Fiction Ruined My Family (6 page)

“What about Maine?” she said, puffing on her cigarette. “Now, that's poverty. A chicken salad sandwich there is only about three dollars!”

I call this my mother's Chicken Salad Financial Index.

WE DIDN'T HAVE health insurance. We knew not to break anything, not to swallow anything other than food, not to fall off anything or trip, not to let anything bite us unless it was our dog. The hot water was shut off all the time. I washed my hair on the third floor in Eleanor's claw-footed tub, which I could lean over and only my head would suffer the freezing water, and then my hair froze on the way to school because there was no heat in our car and it was twenty degrees outside so I had these popsicle locks. I could see my breath in my room in the winter. When things broke, like the shower in the front bathroom on the second floor, we just stopped using them. When our back steps rotted through, someone deemed the front door the only entrance worth using. The Torino wagon was now so rusted through that you could see the road from a hole in the backseat floor, there was a grease spot on the upholstery on the driver's side where my dad's head would touch it, and the gray fume puffs that came out of the tailpipe just needed some dialogue in them to be highly toxic cartoons. The Death Mobile, we called it.

 

 

 

 

MOM HOCKED THINGS from time to time. I remember later on in high school she passed my boyfriend the green beans almondine at our dinner table and asked, “Now, Martin, dear, do you know anyone who might want to buy a pair of antique revolvers? Darling little guns, they were Daddy's.” I guess she figured if he was hanging around the high school at twentytwo looking for a girlfriend he might be the kind of person who might also know where to sell some guns.

Mom was seriously on Dad's case at this point. We needed food, clothes, ballroom-dance lessons. When something came up, my mother would raid the attic even though none of her things would fit any of us. The things in the trunks and boxes were seemingly from another culture entirely, like the mink stoles of Nonnie's with the heads still on. The idea that women wore small animal heads around their shoulders to indicate status and superiority over non–animal-head-wearing women, women who couldn't afford those little beady-eyed heads, was fascinating and nuts to me. The teeny bejeweled cat's-eyes glasses with double thick lenses that Mom wore from about the age of six on were so small that the four of us could never wear them even if we happened to go blind. The white gloves were for the smallest hands imaginable, the hands of a toddler it seemed to us. None of us standard human-sized girls could wear these things that Mom once wore to cotillions and balls. Not the velvet-covered black riding hats—not the teeny beige chaps, not the teeny-tiny riding blazers.

 

 

 

In those days it was weird if your father was around all day; this was before flex-time and perma-lancers and job-sharing. You either had a job or you didn't. I remember filling out forms for the Girl Scouts and coming upon “Father's occupation: _____.”

“What should I say Dad does?” I called out to my mother.

“Freelance writer,” she'd yell and then mumble something under her breath. It was always a moment-by-moment call, what my father did. If he and my mother were getting along, he was a writer. If they were fighting, my mom might yell, “Absolutely nothing,” to my question. Being a writer was like being a baby in an Edward Albee play. Some days your writing existed, some days it didn't, depending on how much people had had to drink, if you had been flirting with some professor down at Sarah Lawrence, if the car had died again and there was no money to fix it.

I remember being mortified when walking with some kids after school and seeing my dad coming out of the pretty red brick house that was the Bronxville library. Other people's fathers spent the day with people, not microfiche.

“Freelance writer.” Surely my parents made this term up to define the hanging around my father did most days? Friends' parents seemed confused when I'd say “freelance writer,” and I'd think, Drop it. Just drop it.

“Who does he write for?”

“Himself,” I would say.

“Oh, really! Anything I might have read?”

“Umm . . . not his novel, that wasn't published . . . do you read
Harper's
magazine? . . . or
Commonweal
? It's a small Catholic magazine, very well regarded . . . he's in
The Norton Reader
, too . . . what's
The Norton Reader
? It's um, an anthology . . .” It was a real pain in the ass having a writer for a dad in a town that wasn't a haven for struggling artists or struggling anything. I heard Don DeLillo lived in Bronxville but I never saw his ass.

The people who did understand what freelance writer meant were my English teachers, a lot of whom were female, single, struggling writers who lived on the Upper West Side. To them, my dad was a gentleman artiste, someone maybe luckier than they as he didn't have to teach, someone who was living it, baby. Dad was asked by my tenth-grade English teacher to come and teach a writing class. He came in a suit, of course—my dad wears a suit, and often a hat, to the coffeemaker. He read the story in the Bible, John 11:35, where a bereft Jesus goes to his friend Lazarus's tomb and demands the stone from his tomb be removed and orders Lazarus out. My father read the shortest phrase in the Bible from that story. “Jesus wept,” my father said, as his audience grew groggy.

“Don't ya just love that? Beautiful. It can't be improved upon. If you can get your writing down to just what's essential and then knock off five more words, you've got it. ‘Jesus wept.' Now, raise your hand if you've read any Joyce at all and I mean even just opened it up and took a shot at it when you were feeling brave.”

No hands were raised.

“Nothing to be embarrassed about, believe me. When the time's right you'll know. Now, the thing about Joyce . . .” The simplicity lesson my father was teaching then moved into Joyce and
The Dubliners,
T. S. Eliot's “The Waste Land,” Proust, and a few English poets. I couldn't really follow it and it seemed like other students were equally perplexed. Unlike at home, though, my father was cut off abruptly after forty minutes by a loud bell that sent children flying past him like preppy pigeons muttering niceties. “Thanks for coming to our class, Mr. Darst.” “Thanks for the writing lesson, have a nice weekend.”

 

 

 

 

HE NEVER GOT ANOTHER regular job despite my mother's pleading, despite her feeling that he could get a teaching job—college, presumably, my father wouldn't go any lower than that. But teaching, on any level, it seemed, was completely out of the question as far as my dad was concerned.

When he wasn't at the Bronxville library he was up in his office on the third floor, a stuffy garret that my six-foot, oneinch father had to stoop over to enter. It wasn't a room, it was an unheated attic most of which served as stole storage, but after passing the Doris Gissy Museum of Ridiculous Fancy Childhoods, you entered a small open space that he had made into an office. There was nothing hanging on the walls, no carpet, no material comforts of any kind—just a giant desk, a giant desk chair, huge filing cabinets, his gray metal lamp with the ON button that you had to hold down until the long fluorescent bulb flickered like lightning as it came to life, pieces of paper with notes on them taped to walls, his microcassette recorder always within reach (“Note to self: Ah, reread Kempton's latest
New York Review of Books
piece, terrific, just terrific”), a heavy magnifying glass, dictionaries everywhere that seemed to be mating and spawning baby dictionaries. It was appealing, if not entirely clear to me what went on in there. His gray filing cabinets, about the same height as me, were filled with his files, his writing, his ideas, notes on pieces to write, and also four files on each of us girls filled with report cards, pictures, notes we had written him or drawings we had made him. He seemed to be enjoying himself very much in his office even as other people seemed to be very, very angry with him. I saw my dad as a wanted man, a right-brain outlaw, with the authorities closing in on him.

 

 

 

 

HE WAS NOT JUST AROUND, he was available. Constantly. Positively up for chitchat, lots of it. With anyone.

“I was talking to the checkout girl at the A&P. Turns out her grandfather was in the Battle of Saint-Mihiel. Probably knew Dagwood.”

“The checkout girl? How'd you get on that subject?” my mother asked.

“Oh, we were just chatting, you know. Hell of a nice gal.”

After picking me up from Teen Center on a Friday night in the Death Mobile he would turn to the backseat and bellow to my friend, “Now, Shannon, who would you say, and I know it's tough to name just one, but if someone had a gun to your head, who would you say is your favorite essayist?”

Any transaction at all was a big one. Even answering the door on Halloween, a fairly mechanical interaction after a while, was alive with conversational possibilities.

“Well now, Charlie Chaplin, what have you got?”

“Dad, they don't have anything, just give them some candy,” I would plead.

“Oh, come now. You've got to do something for this Baby Ruth! Do you think I'm going to simply unhand this chocolate bar for looks alone? Now, what about a poem? A joke? A song? Some verse?”

The kids would sheepishly start back down our walkway, mumbling to themselves.

“Jabberwocky? How about Who's on First?” my father would call at their backs.

 

 

 

 

AS FAR AS EMPLOYMENT, my mother, a woman who grew up with live-in horse trainers and kept a copy of the
Social Register
handy on our living room shelves should someone want to know who in the hell we were, wasn't about to go out and be somebody's receptionist at a dental office in town. (Which is just what she ended up doing.) She was increasingly pissed about supporting us, not something women who went to Manhattanville in 1959 routinely did. “I didn't sign up for this, sweetheart,” she'd say to me as she warmed up for her nightly weepathon. The first mother I saw like mine was Amanda Wingfield in
The Glass Menagerie
, going into reveries about her suitors. There was Rodney, the man my mother should have married, she could have had lunch every day at the St. Louis Country Club. He was presumably a bore and a penny loafer guy. And was named Rodney. Or Chip Boulard, whose family owned the biggest lead company in the world. She could have had the fanciest pencils in all the world, I guess, which, when you're a crossword fanatic as she was, might be no small thing. She talked about how her father never said he loved her, how he worked all the time, how she never saw him, how her parents had a loveless marriage. She told stories of her structured childhood and her academic drive. I spoke French in preschool and now look at me, she seemed to say on a nightly basis.

 

 

 

 

WHILE MY FATHER'S PARENTS were pretty darn sparkly in their heyday, writing for newspapers and hosting radio shows, Katharine in particular being a well-known St. Louis columnist with a searing wit, they were not immune to the difficulties of the writing life, the ups and downs, the financial bumpiness, and when Dagwood died, Katharine's Chicken Salad Financial Index plummeted. Her driver, Edward, came up with the idea of picking her up at the paper, driving her home, opening the car door for her and then, as she made her way up the front walk, transforming superhero style into the butler. As Katharine approached the front door, Edward would dash around to the side door, throw off his chauffeur jacket, throw on a white coat for serving, and rush through the interior of the house to answer the front door for her, as if he were now an entirely different person, and ask her if she wanted her usual martini. Much later, in her seventies, she got by with small writing gigs people gave her. “Crazy Kate,” as her five kids called her, lived out the remainder of her life rather meagerly in a crummy apartment building in St. Louis, with no comforts or financial security, until she went totally mad and lived until her death with my aunt Betty and her eight kids in Betty's turn-of-the-century mansion—which had a working elevator but a nonworking front door, so for years people entered through a gigantic first-floor window.

Writing seemed to get rather rough in your later years. This was the side I was aware of as a kid—the curse of the writing life, the way it seemed to leave you in a tough spot in your old age. I didn't see lawyers suffering like this in their later years. And I worried that my dad might be headed down the same road as his mother. When I read
Death of a Salesman,
I saw my father so clearly in Willy Loman, clinging just a little too tightly to some importance he had known in St. Louis to keep himself going, peddling graphs no one wanted. Knowing that we had no health insurance, let alone life insurance to cash out like Willy, helped me sleep at night. My father's slipping grip on his dream showed itself in various ways. He insisted you look at him while he talked. If you dropped your fork at dinner and your eyes dropped to locate it while he was theorizing on “The Waste Land,” he'd bark, “Look at me while I'm talking to you, God damn it.” You'd find yourself groping for your bread and trying to butter it like a blind person never taking your eyes off him lest his ego catch you taking five. But Willy Loman was suicidal. My dad doesn't have an iota of the depressive in him. He just depresses other people. Nothing brings him down. But this can't be true. I think it just comes out when absolutely no one else is around. It always seemed that while I knew he loved us a lot, my father actually needed nothing to be happy except books. There was enough in literature to challenge, entertain, amuse and inspire a man for a lifetime. Books and music were simply enough to sustain anyone was what he radiated. Humor, love, tragedy, it was all contained therein. And if all he needed was books, then he probably wouldn't mind if he lost the house and the wife and the whole life. Because the story was more important than the family. The story being that he was going to write the Great American Novel and finally be important, and in being important, he would be loved. Willing to lose his family to be loved by his family. Oh, the tragic blunder of this. It could almost drive someone mad. Wait, it did drive someone mad.