Dirty Secret (6 page)

After my dad got out of rehab, my mom checked in. She decided that she was an alcoholic, too, though my dad tells me
later that she wasn't. According to him, she'd have a glass or two of wine and then fall asleep while he finished the bottle and moved on to the next one. My mother also told me that she did acid while she was pregnant with me, which my dad claims is a lie. He did it all the time, he said, but she only did it once, between being pregnant with me and my brother.

Right after the rehab, we moved out of the suburbs and back to Minneapolis, to the house across the street from the elementary school. My mom's house now. Less than a year after we moved in, one evening my dad said he needed to talk to my brother and me. I whined and begged for him to wait until
Welcome Back, Kotter
was over.

He acquiesced and said nothing about my brattiness, which was unlike him. I'd come to think of his temper as his motor revving up; I was able to gauge it by the tightness of his jaw—later I could sense it even from another room, the way you can feel rain before it comes by the thickness in the air. But this time his motor didn't rev up in spite of my whining. That was my first clue that something important was about to happen.

As soon as my beloved sitcom was over, I joined my dad and my brother upstairs in my parents' bedroom. My brother was crying, huddled in my dad's lap.

My dad told me he was moving out.

“You're getting divorced?” I asked, thinking, Good. Now things will have to change.

“We're separating. We haven't decided about the divorce,” my dad said. “We're taking it one day at a time.” This phrase had entered my parents' lexicon during their rehab experiences; it now adorned a small plaque in the living room, where they'd also placed one with the serenity prayer, basically the Lord's Prayer of A.A.

My dad explained that he was getting an apartment and we'd
live with him there, on weekends. My brother was still crying in our dad's lap and I didn't understand why. Our parents were terrible together. If they separated, things would have to get better.

The next day at school, my parents' impending separation got around my second-grade class and for a little while I was thought of as semicool (it was the mid-'70s, so while divorce was on the rise, it wasn't as common as it is today). I'm sure I played the martyr and soaked up the attention. Once we'd moved out of the suburbs and back into Minneapolis proper, a brazen streak had snuck into my shyness: I talked when we were supposed to be reading, and I insisted to my entire class that the word “drawer” was spelled “draw,” even scrawling it in capital letters on the chalkboard. I pronounced it that way due to my mother's accent and was convinced that's how it was spelled.

Sometimes my teacher, Mrs. Haynes, would threaten to send me to the principal's office for talking too much, saying I was “supposed to be shy,” that that's what my mother had told her at the start of the school year, “yet here you are . . .” and then she'd laugh. Each time she said it a glimmer of hope fluttered through me: I was flattered that my mother had taken the time to meet my teacher. A kind of behind-the-scenes mothering I hadn't known about, that might, if I was lucky, sound to the other kids as if I had a normal mother who cared about me instead of one who stayed in bed most of the time, seemed happy only when her arms were full of purchases, and lashed out and pulled my hair with little or no warning.

My dad's apartment, where my brother and I began living on the weekends, was clean and peaceful. For forty-eight glorious hours a week I didn't have to make grilled cheese sandwiches and bring them to my mother in bed, try to find a place for the two cases of cucumber-scented hand lotion she'd purchased because it was on sale, or worry about her shaking me awake at
3:00 a.m. to tell me she was still furious about something I'd done earlier that day—usually “getting fresh,” which I did often.

And there was another punishment, one my mother's new shrink suggested shortly after my dad moved out: My brother and I, whenever we fought, were supposed to walk around the block at whatever time it was, in whatever we happened to be wearing, regardless of the weather—which meant many midnight wintertime walks in just our pajamas.

I know she was just trying to get us to behave and to respect her, but my mother's inconsistency, strange punishments, and mercurial temper did the opposite. During the week while we were at our mother's house, my brother and I were wild: We'd play ding-dong ditch and make shaving cream drawings on our neighbors' windows and car windshields; we pointed a garden hose into an open window of the house next door, soaking a bedroom; we taunted a neighbor girl and tried unsuccessfully to get her to pull down her pants in the alley; we ran from the house at any time of the night, screaming through the streets. We even hopped the fence around the kiddie pool in the park to take late night swims.

On the weekends everything was different. We ate whatever our dad said we were eating and went to bed when he determined. Running outside in the middle of the night was out of the question—I never even tried. I didn't try because the truth was, I liked having rules. I liked knowing that someone was aware of my whereabouts, that an adult was paying attention. I felt safe at my dad's apartment. Yes, he had his motor-revving temper, but I knew how to handle it. Overall, at my dad's, things were calm. My dad not only remembered our birthdays, he even made homemade signs and hung them in his living room, one letter on each piece of construction paper, strung together with yarn and bordered by clusters of balloons. The first time
I woke up there on my birthday, I walked out into the living room and there was the sign:
9 HAPPY BIRTHDAY JESSIE 9
and I was touched that my dad had taken the time to make it. But I couldn't let him know that, so instead I said something stupid about how the “9” starting off the sentence like that didn't make sense. I'd already learned to hide my emotions.

After a weekend at my dad's—going for pizza at The Leaning Tower, to movies, bowling, bike rides around the lakes, hanging out at The Wax Museum, staying up late to watch
Saturday Night Live,
even just sitting by my dad's stereo listening through huge bug-eared headphones to Linda Ronstadt or Beatles records—I dreaded going back to my mom's house on Sunday nights. Often we'd return to an empty house. An empty and
messy
house. My mother was constantly late getting back from wherever she was—a class she was taking to get her nursing license, the library, thrift-store shopping, or “The Club,” which sounded sinister but was really just a smoky house that held A.A. meetings and functioned as a sort of country club for the sober set. My dad, knowing better than to just drop us off and drive away, would always come inside with us. He'd survey the mess and start shaking his head. “This place is a goddamn shithole!” he'd yell and reach for a sponge, a broom, a mop. By the time my mother returned from wherever she was, my dad would have cleaned the whole first floor.

During the rest of the week I tried my best to keep the house neat and the clutter from piling up too badly. I did the cooking. I got my brother and myself ready for school. I even braved the snakes in the basement to do the laundry. Sometimes my mother was depressed and sleeping twenty hours straight; other times she'd be gone all day or late into the night.

The next Sunday I'd hope the house wouldn't be a disaster when we got there. Because whenever my dad deemed the house
a shithole, I felt as if the words were directed right at me—either because I was responsible for the house during the week or because I'd already become the adult in the relationship with my mother. Regardless of why, every time he said the words I'd feel myself starting to hunch my shoulders a little closer together, shrinking. There was something about those words that made me want to disappear.

Two doors down from my mother's house lived a woman named Sandy and her daughter Beth. Sandy and my mother somehow ended up becoming friends, and some afternoons Sandy would come over for coffee; they'd sit at the kitchen table talking and laughing. If Sandy stopped by and my mother was out, she'd invite my brother and me over to her house. If it happened at night, she'd get out the sleeping bags, make us hot chocolate with carob rather than chocolate, and play games with us or read us stories—things my mom never did. We'd spend the night without my mother ever even noticing that we were gone.

I stepped on a cactus one day and I hopped straight over to Sandy's house, where she pulled the needles out one by one. Afterward, her father, who was visiting from California, coated my foot with cayenne pepper, claiming it had miraculous health benefits. I began to wish that Sandy was my mother. I wondered what life would be like.

My brother and I never told my dad about our mother's hair-pulling or the midnight walks around the block. But we must have let little clues slip, because after about a year and a half, my dad began to have a feeling that things weren't right at my mother's. A few months earlier, my mom had had a roommate move in to help with the bills; she was an old friend of my dad's sister. When his sister was in town for a visit, the roommate stopped by my dad's to say hello, and my dad used the opportunity to ask how things were at my mom's house.

The roommate told him that Helen was neglectful at the least, and though she hadn't witnessed any physical abuse, she suspected it. She told my dad about one incident she found particularly disturbing: late one night, I was crying, sobbing so hard I could barely breathe, having a meltdown that increased in intensity in direct proportion to the amount my mother ignored me—which was completely. The roommate, concerned about my purple face and otherwordly shrieks, asked my mother what was going on. My mother said, “Isn't it wonderful? Jessie's getting her feelings out.”

My dad made a decision. He doubted he could get a court to grant him full custody, but he'd move back into the neighborhood and become more involved in my and my brother's lives. He figured my mother would agree to a one week on, one week off arrangement.

My dad had already met Sandy twice, once when he came to pick up my brother and me for the weekend and we were at her place, and once when he took us to a birthday party she threw for Beth. He knew Sandy was a big part of our lives while we were at our mom's and he wanted her opinion of our mother's parenting. He drove to Sandy's house and knocked on her door. Surprised to find him on her doorstep, and in the middle of packing for her own upcoming move across the street to a duplex she'd just purchased, Sandy asked my dad inside. She, too, confirmed the neglectful conditions. That's why she was trying to be there for us as much as possible. Sandy had no idea that my dad even cared about my brother and me, but during the next few hours, as they talked over cups of instant coffee at her kitchen table, she was relieved to realize that my brother and I had one parent looking out for us. And she was impressed when he told her about his plan to move back to the neighborhood. He even had a house picked out: a tiny red one seven blocks away, near the
river. He just needed a Realtor. Sandy immediately offered her services.

Things happened quickly after that. My dad bought and moved into the house he'd chosen, and my brother and I started living with him there every other week.

And Sandy was there, too. A lot. She and my dad were dating.

It was Beth who let it slip that my dad and Sandy were getting married. She was six years old at the time, I was nine, and my brother was seven. The five of us were just sitting down to dinner at my dad's cramped dining room table. I hadn't really been paying attention and only heard her say the words “yellow house” and “married.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

My dad looked at Sandy and raised his eyebrows. Sandy blushed. They both smiled.

“We were going to tell you tonight,” my dad said to my brother and me. He explained that all five of us were going to live there, in my dad's tiny red house, while they renovated Sandy's duplex, the one kitty-corner from my mother's house, into a single-family home. After he told us, he seemed to be waiting for something. Not permission, but a reaction.

“I think it's a great idea,” I said, embarrassed to show how happy I was about the idea of Sandy being my mom officially, embarrassed by how much I wanted it . . . and there was something else.

Guilt. I felt like a traitor to my mother.

She was furious. I talked to her shortly after she found out. She was in the bathtub, soaking away her problems—a habit I may have picked up from her because I do the same thing. Her giant breasts floated on the water's surface like puffy sea creatures.

“I'm getting a goddamn restraining order against him,” she
declared, but her voice was so weak that it was clear she knew what she was saying was ridiculous. What was there to restrain? My dad wasn't trying to talk to her. He wasn't harassing her. He didn't want anything to do with her, and that was why her words were so sad. During the last year, she'd gotten her nursing degree and had begun dating Sam, a sour-faced yet well-intentioned man from The Club. Regardless, the idea of my dad and Sandy getting married upset her. I wished there was something I could say to make her feel better, wished that I wasn't so happy about it myself, but I was.

In the meantime, at the red house, winter was beginning to melt away. On one of the first springlike days, I went outside coatless, so happy about the upcoming changes in my life, about my new family, that I did a cartwheel on the cement walkway leading up to the house. I did a roundoff, my feet landing with a crunch on the melting sheath of ice. I'd been taking gymnastics lessons and competing in occasional meets for four years, since I was five—it was the one thing I considered myself good at. I did a quick back walkover, then another cartwheel, and then another. And then Sandy and my dad pulled up in front of the house. They got out of the car and when Sandy saw me, she said, “Jessie, come on, you really should be wearing a coat.” I laughed, because it felt so good to be reprimanded in a normal way—no jaw-clenching tension from my dad followed by an outburst, no teeth-gritting and then hair-pulling from my mom. No fighting of any kind. Just concern, stated in a calm and kind way. Every time something “normal” like that happened, something you might see on television or at the house of a friend with regular parents, I'd feel my shoulders broaden just a little bit, and the cold, uncertain feeling that lived in the pit of my stomach would go away, at least for a little while.