Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986) (6 page)

The house seemed to float amid the mountains. Broad windows looked out onto pretty fields and dense forests, the inspired architecture giving the vista a gold star the very similar woods outside my own house did not merit. Reich was clearly an important man, and yet he chose to live a life much like mine. I knew influential events happened
in New York City and Washington, D.C., so I couldn't quite make sense of all this, but seeing that place that afternoon legitimized my existence in Maine in a way. The great world I was so desperate to see and experience was closer than I had thought.

My dad and I were ushered into a small theater, alone. We were the only tourists there that day, a number that probably wasn't unusual. I didn't have to understand Reich's counterculture status to realize this was not like other historic homes I'd toured—Mount Vernon or Monticello, with their school groups and gift shops that sold old-fashioned candy that tasted like molasses and mothballs.

The lights dimmed. I sat next to my father, watching the documentary about Reich's life and exile to Orgonon with his young son, Peter. When he'd run afoul of the FDA, his books and accumulators were destroyed. He was sent to prison, where he died.

My dad leaned down to whisper in my ear, “Reich was poisoned in jail. The government does things like that, you know.”

I shivered, the magic of our outing shadowed by something dark. That's what happened to dads who were different, who believed in things no one else did. I hadn't known about such things before. But now I did.

T
hat July, when my mom went into labor, I was in the hospital room. Mom had done a great job of including me in her pregnancy. She was careful to explain what was happening, step-by-step, just as she had with the construction of our house. I think, at age ten, I was probably more distressed by watching Mom give birth than she was by actually delivering the baby. And yet, I was already old enough to understand in some fundamental way that all of these inclusions were how she was trying to make this big change okay for me.

She was one of those moms who was always interested in what I was saying or doing—in almost all of the photos from my early childhood, she is looking at me, as if her happiness depended on mine.
When I became obsessed with ballet, she not only found a way to afford lessons for me, but she and Craig also took me down to Boston to see Rudolf Nureyev dance in
Don Quixote
with the Boston Ballet. She could be counted on to drive me to the library when I'd read all of my books, to help me with Brownie badges, and to encourage my love of baking, even if she modified the recipes to include honey and carob instead of sugar and chocolate. I was important to her, and I knew it. But something was shifting.

Now that she had gotten us to this special sheltered place, she could relax enough to have another family, her “real” family. That's how it felt. They were a unit that fit together—they had the same last name, which I would not take, as if refusing meant I was indifferent to it. They were a part of something that did not entirely involve me, even though I was still Mom's daughter, and Andrew's big sister.

My little brother was a happy child, and exceptionally cute, with a halo of golden blond ringlets and big, blue eyes, the kind of baby strangers stopped to compliment and artists wanted to paint, the antithesis of everything dark about me—my dark eyes, dark hair, freckles, and the dark thing inside of me that had made my father go away, and that kept me yoked to him.

A letter my father sent to Mom that summer starts out: “I just wanted to write and let you know a little of what's going on with me lately, to explain a little of why I've been so out of touch.” He went on to make excuses about how he had been giving her privacy around the birth of her new child, had been occupied by an acute back attack, and that his rent had been raised a hundred dollars, so he could not afford the $375 a month and would have to move.

The card he sent me, along with a Madonna tape I'd requested, simply asked: “How's your new brother or sister?”

That fall, Mom and Craig brought home Kate Bush's album
The Hounds of Love
and listened to it nonstop. I, in turn, fell under its spell. There was one particular song, “Cloudbusting,” that riveted me: “I still dream of Orgonon. / I wake up crying.”

Orgonon really did exist! Those wonderful, brief interludes with my father when he told me things that split open the rest of my childhood like an atom of energy exploded by Reich in his lab. I listened again and again, until I knew every word. I understood its longing for a time that would never come back, its declaration of love in the face of adversity. That was exactly what it had felt like to go to Orgonon with my dad, and to love him from a distance. But no matter how close the song made me feel to him and our time together, during the months I listened to it, he was gone away from me. And I had no idea when I would see him again.

When my father did materialize, just after Christmas of my sixth-grade year, he had a new woman with him. Her name was Eva, she was German, and she had short, dark hair. Having come to America to improve her English, she worked as an au pair in the Boston suburb of Weston, so she was much better with kids. I liked her much more than I did Phyllis.

At nearly eleven, I wasn't the emotionally feral young girl I'd been during Phyllis's reign, which helped me to accept Eva's presence during this rare visit with my dad. I was also just so glad to see him after several years apart, especially during a time I'd felt estranged from Mom and her new family. My dad understood me in a way no one else did—he lived the existence I craved, full of ideas and experiences—and I felt that even one day with him gave me sustenance for my regular life.

I had recently become interested in any clues I could find as to the ways of the grown-up world. The movie that best expressed how I felt,
Pretty in Pink,
reached the theater in our nearby town during the spring of my sixth-grade year. I hated my freckles, and I knew Mom's freckles had also persisted until she was a teenager, so I made a daily vigil to the mirror to see whether mine were lightening. They were not. And then I was gifted with this movie where the opening credits played over close-up shots of Molly Ringwald putting in earrings and applying lipstick, her freckles quite clearly visible, as she's revealed in all of her redheaded glory to be the kind of beautiful, cool girl who
was desired by her male classmates. Maybe my freckles weren't so bad after all.

The movie was a revelation. Molly's character had a complex relationship with her father. She was a nerd—she studied diligently, aspired to go to college as a way out of a life she felt stunted by—and yet she knew about fashion and music and culture. She was my hero. I not only saw the movie at the theater on Friday night, dressed in my pink mock-letterman sweatshirt and fake pink pearls, I also went back to see it on Saturday night. I bought the soundtrack, which was my first exposure to so many amazing alternative bands—Echo & the Bunnymen, the Psychedelic Furs, the Smiths—and the whole new world of the urban underground.

If
Pretty in Pink
was how I envisioned my life—even though the characters were a good seven years older than me, drove cars, drank booze, and had sex off camera, the film depicting my aspirations,
About Last Night,
had come out the summer before. When Betty had suggested we go see a movie during her visit, I didn't mention its R rating.

Even Betty realized at some point that perhaps this movie was not intended for a ten-year-old, maybe during the hot sex scenes between Rob Lowe and Demi Moore, or the charged postcoital banter about whether or not an “I love you” spoken at climax counted as the real thing. She leaned over to me in the darkened theater.

“Did you know this movie was going to be like this?” she asked.

“No,” I said, not shifting my eyes for fear of missing a single nuance.

I was still too young for the sex, really. I was there for everything else. I wanted to live in a big city where I did interesting work and had cool friends and lovers, and every day shone with the heightened sense of importance that life in small-town Maine lacked.

W
hen Betty visited the summer I was eleven, she decided I was ready for my first manicure, at the beauty school where she went to get her hair and nails done because of their discounted prices. Craig had always
cut my hair at home. This was a new and glamorous experience, even if there was really nothing fancy about the fluorescent-lit room with its linoleum tiles. Sitting nervously across from a redneck beauty school student with dramatically feathered hair, I watched as she gently tilted my filthy cast—I'd broken my wrist riding my bike on the first day of summer vacation—to dip my nails into the sudsy water, and so begin the process of grooming me into a lady.

My dad and Eva actually came to visit again that summer, during the same week the Big B and I were together in Portland. Betty took the four of us out to lunch at the most wonderful restaurant in the world—DiMillo's floating restaurant—located in an old boat moored to a dock in Portland's harbor. It floated! There was not a single leaf of kale in sight, except for under the sliced cantaloupe used as a garnish on the plate, and even I knew you didn't eat that (unless you were a glutton like Betty). I was allowed to order whatever I wanted, and I was going to eat fried clams and French fries.

Best of all, my dad was sitting across from me, looking subdued, his face bare of the big beard he'd sported throughout my childhood, his broad shoulders folded into his dress outfit—a newer plaid flannel shirt—his unruly, thinning hair mostly tamed. Next to him, Eva wore the bright, quizzical expression of a foreigner who needs to pay attention to follow the conversation. It was pretty much the perfect day.

Only my dad didn't go in for perfect days in the traditional sense. He reached into his backpack and pulled out plastic bags of prepacked food.

“We're on a macrobiotic diet,” he said.

Eva nodded.

“What?” Betty asked sharply, either because she was old and couldn't hear, or because she was old and couldn't believe what she was hearing.

“It's a principle of eating,” my father began, instantly launching into a lecture on the ideals of the macrobiotic lifestyle and why it was the best choice, not only for him and Eva but for Betty and me, and the
people at the other tables, and even the waiters, and every single other person in the entire rest of the world. He always did his research and was a great talker, so his argument was convincing. Betty was as likely to become macrobiotic as she was to get a face tattoo. I was not having any of it, not today. I'd seen my share of brown rice in my regular life as a hippie kid. My vacations with Betty were all about eating all of the prohibited foods I could, and then eating more.

I was actually relieved by my dad's digression, though, and perked up as I fell into my familiar role as his best listener, ever. Up until that moment, he'd been shut down in his mother's presence. He was always so convinced she was about to publicly humiliate him or try to manipulate him into doing something he didn't want to do—as he felt she'd been doing since he'd gone to live with her out of foster care at age ten—that he'd been pulled up inside of himself almost completely as we sat there. For the long minutes he'd been silent and closed down, I'd anxiously observed him, as on edge as I was whenever I read a tense scene in a book, hating any conflict, even unspoken.

As Betty and I were served our fatty dead qi on a plate, my dad and Eva tucked into their seaweed-wrapped rice balls.

“What is that?” Betty asked, her tone sharp.

And then she lost interest, attacking her meal with the fervor of a once beautiful woman who had long trafficked in the favors of men, and had therefore been on a diet her entire life, and was now going to eat every French fry the universe put in her path.

My father gazed into the middle distance in his usual intense way—he raised spacing out to an art form—before turning to look at me.

“So, Sarah,” he said. “We have to tell you something.”

I smiled, still innocent enough to be unaware that when the adults “have to tell you something” they are never offering you a trip to Disneyland.

He looked at Eva. She smiled encouragingly. He smiled back at her. Looked at me. “We're going to have a baby,” he said.

“Oh,”
I said, not able to fake happiness, not even for my father.

Here was another baby with two parents, another baby at the center of a family that did not include me. Each of these families contained a finite amount of space, of time, of money, of love, and there would never be enough left over for me. As far as I was concerned, I was the only person who could be relied upon for anything, and it was better if I accepted it up front. Soon after this, I began fantasizing about getting my own apartment, in Portland, or even better, Boston. In my dream life, I was at the center of a vibrant world of new experiences and people, dipping in and out of our interactions without ever needing anything concrete from them.

M
y sister, Asmara, was born in a birthing tub in the living room of my father's Somerville apartment the following January, just before my twelfth birthday, when my brother was eighteen months old, and his constant need for care seemed to dominate everything at home. My father sent me a card with the news and the explanation that her name meant “love” in Indonesian. I didn't hear much from him after that. Twelve years after my birth, he had not changed at all. It didn't take even a year for Eva to reach the same conclusion Mom had reached in two—that raising a baby with a man who was as much in need of mothering as any child was actually harder than raising a baby without him.

That fall, Eva took Asmara home to the Bavarian town of Garmisch-­Partenkirchen, eighty minutes outside of Munich by train, where her own mother lived, and raised her there. My father did not share his reaction to any of this with me at the time. After Eva left, he simply disappeared once again. I still waited for him, but this time, I was also waiting to get out.