How to Cook Your Daughter (11 page)

If he were sober, however, the rides to New Jersey were great. He told us stories of the “Tunnelkins,” creatures who had a wheel rather than legs and spent their days rolling from place to place, hiding behind the metal doors that line the sides of the tunnel. Of course, there was an evil ruler of the Tunnelkins, who was forever torturing his subjects.

There had always been much after-hours socializing among the
Lampoon
staff. A lot of it involved drinking together, a component that my father insisted was vital to the creative engine of the magazine. One of the favorite hangouts was the Coral Café, a bar in a hotel across the street from the
Lampoon
. Kathy and I went there once—very briefly. I remember finding it pretty swank at the time. In truth, it was a complete dive. The conversations that took place there were, in my father's words, “extreme. Sometimes, the talk was of dead babies. Sometimes it was about Nixon. The level of verbal sparring was such
that if you did not hold your end up you were discarded,” he said years later. Being eight at the time, I failed the test. Kathy and I were duly discarded and did not go again. Nor was my mother welcome at these cutthroat sessions. Few women ever were present, except perhaps Anne Beatts, who, as far as I know, was the
Lampoon
's only female editor. The Coral Café became a kind of
Lampoon
boys club where, in the tradition of all good boys clubs, the only women were the ones serving the drinks or getting fucked on the side. The alcohol itself was cheap, and, as my father wrote, “The drinks cost the same as subway fare, so there was no point in going home.” Especially if you had no particular interest in spending the evening with your family.

But my dad is a complicated man. He often felt guilty about the drinking, the drugs, the affairs, the betrayals. One night, I went into the kitchen and found him lurching around the loft. He flung himself down on the sofa and started to sob. I offered to sing him a song—the only thing I could think of to make him feel better. And so we sat on the sofa, and I sang him all the lullabies I could remember while he sniffed and wiped his eyes and eventually feel asleep. But the guilt didn't stop him from replaying the same scene the next night. My father's feelings of regret drove him to try harder to cover up his chemical abuse, and his shame became just another part of his drug and alcohol problems.

That's why I tried to stop him from going out at all. Despite what had happened in New Jersey, I still felt compelled to keep
him
safe. When I heard my father opening the stairwell door after everyone had already gone to bed, I flew off my mattress and ran to him. I just couldn't bear the anxiety of wondering all night where he had gone—and if he were safe.

“Daddy, please don't go out now, please!” I was almost crying, and I quickly slipped between him and the door.

“I'm just going out to get some cigars, treasure. I'll be back soon,” he promised. I refused to budge. I had heard the cigar line before.

“Jessie, I promise. I am just going out to get some cigars. I will come right home.” I relented and moved away from the door. What could I do? He went past me down the dim stairwell, and I stood there, listening to his footfalls until they went silent. I shut and locked the door, then tried to stay awake. Finally I abandoned my vigil and, like all the times before, swore never to believe the cigar story again.

The mornings after a binge were the worst. My father was in a horrible mood, and, if he had been doing a lot of coke the night before, the sniffing, snorting, coughing, and spitting were deafening and non-stop. And there was always the morning weigh in, a ritual more usual than the yawn-and-stretch. Daddy would stand naked in the middle of the kitchen on an old postmaster's scale. I feared the weigh-ins. The results would either produce elation or, more often, a black fit that included screaming, throwing things, and, on occasion, bashing holes in the bathroom wall. At those moments, the thin wafer crackers came out, food logs were kept, and Daddy officially began a diet again. Watching my father's rage if he gained weight reinforced the sense I already had that being fat was a terrible, terrible thing. Poor Kathy. She had become a target of my father's
because
she was chubby. Even at eight, I grew very self-conscious about my body, especially after what had happened with my dad. I instinctively wanted to hide myself, to stay small, to never grow. I felt awkward and clumsy and went into a panic one day when I overheard my mother telling a friend that I had “a swimmer's build.” To me, that meant I was getting fat. And if I got too heavy, I knew Daddy would despise me.

Predictably, I had a lot of anxiety about my first day in the New York City public school system. Kathy and I were going to go to P.S. 41
in the West Village. There were so few kids in our immediate neighborhood that we didn't have a local public school, so even though we were technically in the East Village, the West Village schools were ours too. Not that the school wanted us. My mother had to shout to make her point heard the day we signed up. The school officer muttered something about the perils of letting us in and was so rude that a teacher who had overheard the exchange afterward apologized to my mother. Kathy, my mom, and I walked over to Greenwich Avenue on the first day of class. I was sick to my stomach at the idea of new kids and new teachers. Miss Mole never looked so good.

My mother left us at the gate. I sniveled; Kathy looked grim. I have no memory of my teacher, just of another new girl who would become my closest confidant for years to come. Her name was Krisztina. Our early connection was perhaps prophetic if only because it signaled to Krisztina that I had some pretty deep anxieties.

Right after our snack time on that first day, I felt nauseated. I asked to be excused and chose Krisztina to be my bathroom buddy. She stood outside the stall door listening to me throw up milk and cookies. The next day, the same: first, the snack, then right to the bathroom. The entire first week we repeated the routine. Once or twice, I went to see the nurse. But there seemed to be nothing wrong with me, just new-school nerves.

Krisztina was bigger and stronger than me, and she became protective after our trips to the bathroom together. We could not have looked more different. Krisztina's face was round and full, her skin almost olive, her hair rich and dark. She seemed sturdy; I looked frail and edgy, as if I might break. But we complemented each other, and even when we weren't in the same class, we stayed friends.

My mother wasn't very happy with the school, which smacked a
bit of the conservative Lebanon Township. And Kathy was even more miserable than I was. She hated her new teacher and didn't like any of the kids in her class. So my mom decided to look into another public school, also in the West Village. P.S. 3 was an experimental school with an inspirational principal, but the classes, which combined several grades in the then-fashionable open classroom system, were hit or miss. Kathy lucked out and got a wonderful teacher who really had a handle on the classroom. In my class, a mixture of kids from the third grade and above, a day was successful if everyone sat down for at least thirty seconds. Some of the kids were truly intimidating, especially the ones who had been left back a few times and now towered over my little eight-year-old frame. Ironically, the toughest girls in my class were named Hope, Charity, and Faith, and my still-noticeable cross eye drew their attention. They flung at me all the usual insults, as well as a few new ones, such as “crossed-eyed bitch” and “fucking four eyes” if I dared to wear my glasses. There also was the occasional violence at P.S. 3, but I never saw a gun—mostly just a lot of punching. Then there was the fabled day when a kid brought his knife to school and went after another kid's foot. And the time when a boy managed to climb up on the roof and began tossing broken tiles into the yard below. Hearing of all this, my mother volunteered to help supervise during recess. Within minutes, she felt overwhelmed when a boy grabbed a girl's long earring and tore it straight from her ear.

To up enrollment, quite a few kids were bused in from Harlem—an idea conceived with the best of intentions, but one that also created a lot of racial tension. Fights between white and black kids were almost everyday occurrences, and everyone would gather in a circle around the dueling pair. One side would chant: “A fight, a fight, a nigger and a white. If the nigger don't win, we'll jump in!” And then the
other: “A fight, a fight, a nigger and a white. If whitey don't win, we'll jump in!” Kathy and I were too intimidated to stick around to watch the fights, which were held in the street after school.

The lunchroom also featured plenty of action. Kathy had a boy in her class, Sidney, who liked to wear to school the bras of his sister, Big Susan. Not only was Susan busty for her age, but she also held the coveted position as the leader of the girls' gang. At lunch one afternoon, Sidney jumped atop one of the tables and began to rip off his shirt. There it was, Big Susan's bra draped across his scrawny, nine-year-old chest. Sidney spun the T-shirt over his head in true stripper fashion before flinging it into the lunchroom crowd. Then, just as he began to unbutton his fly, a teacher yanked him off the table.

A few months after school started, I was dragged into a corner of the playground. A group of ten-and eleven-year-old girls decided it was time to tell me, the new kid, the facts of life. “You know all that shit about the stork and finding you under a cabbage patch? Well guess what, Cross Eyes? That's a load of crap….” I don't remember exactly what they said, but I didn't bother to tell them that I'd never had the pleasure of believing in the stork anyway. Neither did I mention that the Easter Bunny was, according to my father, “the risen Christ vampire.” I had seen a lot, and I already knew far more than I should. But I looked so innocent, so awkward, so small, and so shy that no one would have guessed my secrets.

Later that fall, my father had a building fit and made some new “rooms” for Kathy and me. In truth, we stayed in the same room, but my dad raised my bed above Kathy's and attached a wooden ladder so I could climb up. My new “room” was so high that, from my bed, I could see right over the six-foot wall that blocked the back of the loft from the living room area. That meant I could hear every word spoken
in the kitchen. Usually there wasn't much eavesdropping to do; the remarkable thing about my parents' relationship was how little they fought, given how much they had to fight about. In fact, I don't remember ever hearing my mother raise her voice to my father, no matter his behavior. But one night I awoke to what seemed like a serious discussion.

“She's pregnant,” I heard my father say. And for once, he actually sounded guilty.

“
WELL, WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?” MY
mom seemed more exasperated than surprised.

“I don't know, Jude. I don't know.” My dad sometimes called my mother Jude.

“She'll have to get an abortion, I suppose.”
Why wasn't she angry?

Daddy kept silent, and I sat straight up in bed, straining to hear more. I had no idea what an “abortion” was, but I did know what it took to get pregnant, especially after my facts-of-life session at school. Maybe if I went down the ladder and stood by the living room wall, I could catch what else they were saying.

In the dim light, I made my way down from my loft. I realized too late that I had forgotten to navigate around the punching bag my father had hung from the ceiling; I was used to waking up to the sounds of him sparring. My parents were pacifists, save for the punching bag and the Two-by-Four List—a running tally kept by my father of all the people, mainly right-wing politicians and sanctimonious Hollywood stars, whom he wanted to hit with a two-by-four
(among them: Nixon, Agnew, Jane Fonda, and Barbra Streisand). In the darkness of the loft, I walked smack into the punching bag and felt it sway ever so slightly, creaking as the chain that held it up swung back and forth. I looked across to where my sister slept. She hadn't stirred. But my parents remained silent. I decided to head back up the ladder to bed, and that night, the pregnant woman appeared in my dreams in the form of a tall, blond woman with a large, pink hat covering her face. I never dared ask my mom or dad about what I had heard, but it made me feel even more deeply that my family was a mess.

Even though we were now at different schools, Krisztina and I continued to grow closer. We saw each other almost every day, and she often came to the country with us on the weekends. If Daddy came home stoned or drunk, I had the superstitious and totally irrational idea that if Krisztina were with us, nothing terrible would happen. The house suffered in our absence, especially in the winter when we might arrive from the city on Friday night to find the pipes frozen solid. But we girls thought these domestic crises were fun. Kathy and I were passionately reading the
Little House in the Big Woods
books. We took to calling our mother “Ma” and felt like Laura and Mary Ingalls as we bounded down to the river in the early morning with pans and buckets to get water for washing and cooking. We even took to dressing up to do our household chores, donning the long skirts we had from Mrs. Kruger's junk shop.

Often, I went over to Krisztina's house for sleepovers. Her parents had met in a communist prison camp in Hungary before the revolution, and they managed a daring and romantic escape to Paris, eventually settling in New York. When I met Krisztina, they had recently divorced. Her father, an artist, was a quiet man who never really
embraced American life the way Krisztina's mother had. Perhaps this was one of the problems that had ended their marriage. Krisztina's mother, Olga, supported herself as a textile designer. To me, she seemed a glamorous woman, a Central European Audrey Hepburn. I say Central European because many of the Hungarians I came to know through Krisztina became enraged at my assumption that they were Slavic or even Eastern European. I once got an earful from Olga for presuming that Hungarian and Bulgarian had the same linguistic roots. Olga wore thin black eyeliner on her wide brown eyes, her hair pulled back in a chignon, and a hand-painted, brilliantly colored scarf tied fashionably around her neck. She smoked long Benson and Hedges cigarettes and spoke in a throaty accent that was much more exotic than my parents' British ones. Her bathroom held pots of pink cold cream, lipsticks in wonderful cases and colors, and perfumes from Paris—the sort of things that were never part of my mother's liberal 1970s style. If Krisztina and I wanted to play with makeup or pretend to file our nails with emery boards, we went to Olga's apartment on Fourteenth Street.

Being glamorous and newly single, Olga had a busy social schedule. Often, she would leave Krisztina and me in the apartment at night. “Be good, girls,” she would say in her Zsa Zsa Gabor voice, and before she had even left the building, we were pulling clothes from her closet, trying on dresses, and taking turns zipping each other up. The scarves and high heels were the last pieces in our transformation. I became “Fanny Radcliff” and Krisztina “Jackie Clifton.” We lit candles and pretended we were in a fancy restaurant eating Cap'n Crunch cereal with crunch berries out of Olga's best bowls and drinking vintage grape juice from her thin-stemmed, crystal wine glasses.

Krisztina liked being with my family, given her parents' split, but I
liked it at her house better because there were never any drugs. My father's coke use had grown heavier, and he often did lines on the kitchen table. Once, I found some in the fridge, and thinking it was confectioner's sugar, put my finger in it and took a taste. I winced, and suddenly, my gums became numb, and I felt like my head were about to explode.

I don't really know who dealt to my father; I do know there were certain bars he used to frequent regularly. Sometimes I was with him when he stopped in for a drink (a soda on my end), and I saw some very warm handshakes with the bartender and a little white packet slipped into Daddy's pocket. I also recall picking up the phone one night in the loft and having a rather bizarre conversation with a man who was looking for him.

“Hello?” I said.

“Hey man, is Tony there?” A slow, slurred voice could barely get out the words.

“No.”

“Who are you, man? This is Brie. I mean, I
think
that's who I am, but none of us really knows, you know? You think you are who you are, but you just don't know.”

“Yeah,” I said, completely confused.

“Who do you think
you
are?” the voice asked again.

I wasn't up to an existential conversation with a stoned stranger. “Daddy's not here,” I said and put down the phone quickly.

More and more often, Daddy had “colds” in the morning and would sniff and splutter like crazy. Exercise became his one relief for his massive hangovers. It seemed a form of confession for him during the years that he didn't set foot in a church. He was a good runner, and often Kathy and I would get on our bikes and ride alongside him for
miles. If we were in the country, we went along the roads around the house. If we were in the city, we rode across town and followed a bike path that ran along the West Side Highway. Daddy would joke that we were his trainers. We played along. “Get your knees up, Hendra!” we'd shout. Or “Come on, you can do it!” as we raced ahead. The punching bag had inspired him to take up boxing again, and he joked that his fight name was “The Game Cornish Hen,” a play on his Cornish ancestry. When I look back, it amazes me that despite all the terrible things he was doing to his body, my dad managed to stay in pretty good shape. But all through the long rides he would snort, sniff, and spit huge globs of thick, green saliva into the street.

Things were going well at the magazine in 1974 and 1975, years that many consider the heyday of the
Lampoon
. My dad was firmly established as “in,” and the man who had been his closest friend and then his fiercest enemy, Michael O'Donoghue, was out. My father later wrote that the day Michael quit was “somber,” but he also admitted that he was “not a passive party…. I did my best to cut him out. And I did—I drove him out.” Professionally my father was at the top of his career and devoted himself to the magazine. My mother once told me that the times my father was most confident were also the times he was most dangerous. By that she meant that his behavior had no boundaries. When his confidence was high, he became omnipotent and felt morally untouchable. He had more affairs, he drank more, he did more drugs and behaved with a “fuck you” arrogance that put him above everyone else. Perhaps that's why, around this time, after almost three years with no repeat of what had happened in New Jersey, my father touched me again.

It was in the bathroom of the loft, the only room in the place with walls and a lock. I had gone into the bathroom to chat with my dad
while he bathed, something I did quite often. After all, seeing him naked was nothing new. The bathtub was right next to the toilet, and Daddy often used a shower attachment to clean his hair and back. I sat talking to him while he washed. But unlike all the other times, when he left the bath this time, he had an erection. I didn't really know what it was, but I could tell that his penis looked different than it usually did. He stood next to me in his towel as I got up from the toilet. I must have been wearing a nightgown or a dress because I remember he reached into my underwear. I simply looked up at him. He put his fingers in my vagina as he had in New Jersey that night years before. And again he said those words: “You're too small.” Then he asked me to touch his penis. Unlike the incident two years before in New Jersey, I don't remember what happened after that. Except that, like that first night, I did whatever he asked.

This time, there were no signs of trauma, no rubbing of my eye or refusing to go to school. Again, it never occurred to me to tell my mother. She couldn't stand up for herself with him, let alone for me. And so I went to school the next day, continuing to feel awkward and shy, nervous around boys and worried about my body. About a year later, Dad touched me in the bathroom again.

It was not until about two years after that I finally told someone all that had happened with Dad. Of course, my confidant was Krisztina, my best and only true friend. I must have been around eleven or twelve.

We had steadily grown closer and closer as the years passed, and Krisztina had become almost a part of our family. But for some reason, she hadn't been able to join Kathy and me dressing up as young hookers for a photo shoot that included other children whose names I've since forgotten.

It was for the June 1977 issue. The “joke” was that we were being given a special award for making the most money during the summer. The picture shows us sitting on a suburban lawn somewhere (we might have driven to Connecticut), dressed in true 1970s “Super Fly Boutique” clothes that had to be pinned on and shrunk by the stylist to fit us. I was given a long cigarette holder and huge white boots with a purple fire design up the sides. The boots had platform heels, and I remember the extraordinary feeling of walking in them, as if I were floating. I had on a pink miniskirt and top and white sunglasses. Kathy had cut-off shorts, heels, and a bright orange boa. The boys were dressed in pimp suits with tall, black hats. None of us understood the humor of the picture, but the
Lampoon
crew found it hilarious. All of us got the usual pay from the magazine, $50, but I also got to keep the boots, which became part of our dress-up collection.

We were on a sugar high when I told Krisztina about Daddy. Kathy was out somewhere, so we were sitting down by her bed in the loft. We liked to sit down there, especially if we wanted privacy. My “room,” being on top, was easily seen from the rest of the loft.

We had just brought home a stash of Twinkies from the deli on Broadway and Eighth Street, and as we ate them, we began on the subject of how fun it was to sleep together. We could talk and laugh as late as we wanted. And for some reason, that reminded me of the night in New Jersey. I cringed inside. I was getting old enough to understand a little more clearly what had happened that night, and my shame about it was growing. Suddenly, I blurted out: “Daddy touched me in weird ways one night.” She put her Twinkie down and looked at me. “What do you mean?” I said very little else—just that he had touched me in places he shouldn't have and that I didn't like how I felt—then or now. I told her he made me touch him back. Then
Krisztina confided in me. A teenage boy had done “experiments” on her when she was eight, she said. He had touched her and had her touch him back. He had even put his thing inside her. We never thought of going to any grown-ups with our stories. What was the point?

Krisztina and I grew more daring during our sleepovers at Olga's. We never stayed at Krisztina's dad's apartment because he didn't keep Olga's social schedule. The older we got, the longer she left us alone, once or twice for the whole night. Krisztina and I moved up from grape juice and tried Olga's real wine. We even snuck a few of her Benson and Hedges.

We learned that with heels and a bit of lipstick we looked older and could get into see movies by ourselves. Not one ticket taker ever blinked as we passed over our money. Krisztina was usually the buyer. She already looked like a teenager even without the makeup. We walked over to the movie house on Seventh Avenue and saw
Rocky
at least four or five times and
The Spy Who Loved Me
even more. We figured out that there was a back door that could be opened just after the movie started, so if we were short on money, we only had to buy one ticket. Usually Krisztina orchestrated the maneuver, and I dawdled in the alley, waiting for her to quietly crack open the back door. It worked countless times until one night when Krisztina emerged from the front entrance of the theater with devastating news. An usher with a large flashlight had come to check out why she was standing by the back door of the theater. If only Krisztina had the diplomatic skills of my father! After that, we both bought tickets.

I liked dressing up and looking like a sixteen-year-old. But at the same time, I was worried about my impending curves and the whole idea of becoming a woman. I felt squeamish about getting my period
or wearing a bra, both of which, I knew, were in my near future. What had happened to me, and all the nudity I had seen as a child, left me ashamed and embarrassed about my own body. In fact it was Olga who told me point blank that it was about time I start wearing a bra. She terrorized me with stories of what might happen to my “figure” if I ignored her. Instead of taking the subject up with my mother, I begged Krisztina to let me have one of her bras. I remember the first day I wore it. I felt none of the adolescent pride that I knew some girls had when they came to school with those telltale lines under their shirts. I took to wearing baggy tops.