How to Cook Your Daughter (4 page)

“Was this girl giving you a Sieg Heil?” he asked me.

Thankfully, by the next morning, my father had forgotten about the note and protesting against the safety. He was busy getting ready to go to New York. There was more and more work for him at the
National Lampoon.

My mother would shuttle him to the commuter bus that left from Clinton (about fifteen minutes from our house) and went into the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Many evenings, Kathy and I would go into Clinton with Mom to pick up Daddy. Sometimes, he would have spent the night—or even a few nights—in New York, and we always looked forward to seeing him again. Often, he would bring little goodies back from the city. I remember once he brought back some caviar and black truffles he had shoplifted from Bloomingdale's. Stealing from the “big stores” was “a moral imperative,” he told me, flashing his loot proudly. “But never steal anything from a mom-and-pop store, okay, Jessie?” Of course I said yes, but I didn't understand at all. I didn't know what “imperative” meant, but I knew that stealing was wrong. Was my father a no-good thief or a modern-day Robin Hood?

Then one night Daddy emerged from the bus with his head wrapped in an enormous white bandage streaked with red where the blood seeped through. He looked like a bleeding Mummy, and Kathy and I were horrified. Later that night he told us the story of what had happened, and I was
convinced
he was Robin Hood.

HE WAS WALKING WITH A FRIEND DOWN IN SOHO LATE
the night before when a car came speeding down the street and almost hit them. He yelled at the driver to slow down, and the driver did more than that. He stopped, backed up, and jumped out of the car, pulling a gun on my dad. Daddy thought that was it, that the man was going to shoot him right then and there in the face. But then the man heard a police siren coming toward them, and, instead of firing, he hit my dad over the head with the pistol and sped off.

I was thrilled and frightened by my father's bravado. I had seen him yell at a good many cars, and I believed his story. I would have believed
anything
he told me. I learned the truth only recently. My dad had, in fact, been pistol-whipped, but in a barroom brawl. It turns out he was defending a woman he was having an affair with at the time, something that would have been hard to explain to your six-year-old daughter, let alone to your wife. Regardless, my mother rarely questioned him about his often erratic behavior or about the increasing
frequency with which he stayed in the city. Before cell phones and answering machines, it was harder to track people down. You could just disappear—and my father often did.

After Daddy's bloody return from New York, I became even more anxious about him going there. I worried he would yell at a car again and that, this time, he
would
get shot, hurt, or run over. That we would go to Clinton to pick him up from the bus, and he would come down the steps covered from head to toe with bandages oozing blood. Or worse, that he would not be on the bus at all—that he would be lying dead along side some New York street curb.

The days he stayed home in New Jersey to write were always better. On those days, I could keep track of him. I could relax and not worry so much while I played with our neighbor, Becky Bradford. We'd play dress ups, go in the stream, or just run around outside. Neither Kathy nor I were much for dolls, especially not Barbies, at least not around our house. Playing with Barbies meant enduring jabs by my father, who found the dolls absurd. As he put it, “Only in America would they make a doll for kids with tits like that.”

If we wanted to play dolls, we would walk up the long gravel driveway to Becky's. Her mother, Connie, made us peanut-butter-and-grape-jelly sandwiches on spongy white bread while she inhaled Parliaments. Like most everyone but my mother, she wore the standard Brady haircut and pants suit of the normal mom. Best of all, she thought Barbies were cute. I could play for hours up at their house, reveling in Wonder Bread, Fresca, Barbies, and maybe even an episode of
Mighty Mouse
. The Bradford house was my portal to suburban America. I felt slightly guilty when I returned from a day at Becky's—as if I had been off doing something illicit. I wondered:
Could my parents smell the Hamburger Helper on my breath?

I never stopped feeling awkward and out of place at Lebanon Township School. But there seemed one way to belong.

I had seen them sitting outside the A&P supermarket in Clinton. They always wore their hair in little bows or pig tails, and they dressed in crisp, green dresses; little caps; white knee socks; and brown shoes. The cookies came in neat packages laid out on the tables in front of them. And next to the boxes were pictures of the girls sitting around a campfire, putting up canvas tents, or holding the hands of grateful-looking old ladies. I wanted to be one of those girls. I wanted to look official and perky and go camping and sing songs. I wanted to sit outside of the A&P on Saturday mornings with my friends, giggling and selling cookies.

But I found out from the girls in my class that you couldn't just become a Girl Scout. You had to
earn
that green uniform. You had to make it through the Brownies.

I decided not to tell Daddy about joining the local Brownie troop. If he thought the safeties at school were Nazis…well, I had a feeling that he wouldn't approve of the uniformed Brownies. It was always easier to tell my mother about such matters. She said if I wanted to go to the next troop meeting, that was fine.

I would go to the first meeting without the official brown uniform, which I would get sometime before the second meeting. I couldn't wait—an official Brownie. The first step toward becoming a full-fledged Girl Scout—the campfires, the singing, the Saturday-morning cookie sales. Nirvana!

The troop met after school, and on the day I went, the Brownies were making plastic place mats for the cookout—
cookout!
—they were having in a few weeks. The mats were made by weaving rows of plastic strips, each a different color, into a large rectangle. I was invited to sit
on the floor as part of the Brownies' circle and join in, my first semi-official act as a troop member. It wasn't selling cookies or sitting around a campfire. But that would come soon enough. And I'd have this cool placemat…this rainbow of a placemat…this awful, impossible-to-make placemat! Ugh! The plastic strips kept slipping and fell out of order. And when I pulled them tight, they'd break. My mat wasn't even close to the rectangular beauty on display by the troop leader. It was a lumpy mess!
Am I really Girl Scout material after all?
I wondered. Next to me, a girl with a pixie haircut and a button nose wove a perfect mat: smooth, not too tight, and flat as a pancake.
She'd
be ready for the cookout.

Pixie Girl must've felt me watching her because she turned a second later and looked down at the mass of twisted, snapped plastic strips on my lap.

“You're doing it all wrong,” she said. It was really more of a whine. And then, “Your mat looks really dumb.”

Dumb?
This from a uniformed Brownie.

“Well….” I mumbled.
What should I say?
I knew it had to be good. Then, it came to me: “You're a stupid asshole!”

The words flew from my mouth. Loud. Bold. Proud! They echoed through the room, and every hand stopped weaving. Plastic hung suspended in the air. Every Brownie froze. After a moment, Pixie Girl broke the silence.

“That girl called me a bad word. A really bad word!”

She pointed at me as she hollered, but she could've saved her breath. There wasn't a single person in that room, including the troop leader herself, who had missed the word “asshole” coming from the mouth of the struggling new recruit. I looked down at the green tiles of the floor, my face burning.
What would they do to me?
I was reminded
of a few days earlier, Sunday, when my dad had been out on the lawn behind the house trying to fix the lawnmower. He had been cursing at the top of his lungs, calling the mower “a fucking lump of shit” and “a goddamn son of a bitch”—terms once reserved for the laboring VW bus. Suddenly, a man's voice, carried by the wind and through the trees near Connie and Doug Bradford's house: “Watch your stinking mouth, Hendra, or I'll have you arrested!”

Arrested? Is that what was going to happen? They'll haul me away and lock me in jail? Or would they just wash my mouth out with soap like I saw Connie do to Becky's brother Jeremy when he called her a “Fat Cootie?”
Becky and I had peeked through the crack of the bathroom door and watched Connie pry open Jeremy's mouth and wedge half a bar of Ivory Soap between his jaws. It foamed as he gagged and spat. Connie added a bit of water and scrubbed her hand around his mouth. Finally she let him go and sent him to his room in tears.
Which was worse: prison or Ivory Soap?

The troop leader made her way toward me, her pink face red, her lips trembling. Only her hair, frozen by hairspray, remained calm.

“Jessica Hendra, you will stand up and walk from this room immediately!” I did as I was told and abandoned my plastic mat then and there. “Go and wait outside for your mother to pick you up. You are
not
to come back,” she told me.

And then, the worst words of all: “You will never be a Brownie!” In that one moment, the dreams of the cookouts, the cookies, and the campfires were over.

Banished…a punishment worse than soap or jail. A life without the uniform I so desperately wanted. I left the troop meeting disgraced—a Girl Scouts of America juvenile delinquent. Outside, I waited for Mom. The troop leader occasionally peeked out the
window to make sure I remained planted on the bench, but I didn't have the energy to make any more trouble.

Finally, my mother arrived. She wore a cardigan over my favorite of her T-shirts, this one from the Pink Pussy Cat Boutique. It had a sly-looking cat on it and words that, just the other day, I had struggled to read: “Stroke Me and I'll Purr.” Of course I didn't know that the Pink Pussy Cat Boutique was an infamous sex shop in the West Village. I just thought the cat was cute.

When I saw her, I started crying.

“What happened, Jessie?”

I told her the whole story, about the deformed plastic mats, about the pixie-haircut fiend, about the life sentence handed down by the troop leader.

“Oh well,” she consoled. “Maybe they'll forget about it and let you back in.”

But I knew that would never happen. We walked over to the classroom where Kathy remained in a Brownies meeting with a slightly older troop. I looked through the window. She was still in the weaving circle, and I could tell things had gone more smoothly for her. But she didn't look thrilled. She looked stoic, her glasses balanced on her nose, her brown hair hung straight and flat on her shoulders, her pudgy face tensed as she listened to the parting words of her troop leader.

When Kathy came outside, she walked apart from the other girls.

“How did it go?” my mother asked.

“Fine,” Kathy said curtly.

“Do you want to go next week?”

“Yes,” and that was it. When my sister didn't want to talk about something, there was no coaxing her. And my mother wasn't one to coax. I didn't feel like talking either, and we sat in silence in the back
of the VW bus. But my father was home that night, and I told him what happened. Now that I would never be a Brownie, there seemed no reason not to.

“Screw 'em,” he said. “It's an inane fascist organization. I can't imagine why you would ever want to be a part of that.”

His reaction left me feeling better and worse. Better because he made me believe that the Girl Scouts were stupid anyway; worse because now, I felt stupid for wanting to be one in the first place. At the time, I didn't consider where his comments left Kathy, who was determined to struggle on in her troop. But then Kathy always had a kind of determination that I never did. She seemed almost immune to my father's pronouncements. There was a distance between him and her, a mutual distrust. And as I became increasingly obsessed with Daddy, she became increasingly private and emotionally contained. My mother saw the bond that had formed between Daddy and me. Though I thought I looked strange, with my drifting eye and blond hair, she reminds me today that I was charming and cheerful—and, as she puts it, “infinitely easier to get on with than Kathy.” Perhaps so. I just remember how very afraid I was for Daddy, that something terrible might happen to him. I felt better and safer when I was with him, and feeling safe became my obsession. Even at six, I felt I had to always keep tabs on my father because my mother never did.

In the months that followed, he traveled more and more to New York. His work for the
Lampoon
seemed to be picking up. In part, that was because of the piece he had written late that summer. I can still remember how he came bounding into the house from his barn office, declaring proudly that he had something in mind for the magazine.

“It's called ‘How to Cook Your Daughter,'” he told us.

Cook
your daughter?
I was beside myself. “Why do you want to cook us, Daddy?” I sobbed, my face crumbling.

Kathy never flinched. She announced that if my father was going to write about cooking her, then she was going to write about cooking
him
. “What a splendid idea!” my father said, and he encouraged her to write and draw a companion piece. “We'll call it, ‘How to Cook Your
Father.'”
It was published in the
Lampoon
that September, on the page that faced Daddy's article. Of course, neither Kathy nor I understood the sexual overtones of my father's piece—why the daughter would be wearing “a bikini top, black velvet choker, (and) ankle socks” and rubbed with oil and liqueur. I was just jealous of the $50 Kathy got from the
Lampoon'
s publisher, Matty Simmons.

But I'll never forget the look on my father's face when he first told us the title. He said it with a slight challenge in his voice, almost as if he meant to upset us. I wonder why he told us at all? Why not just keep it to himself? We never would have known what he was writing up there.

Whatever our misgivings, the guys at the
Lampoon
must have liked it. By the time Christmas vacation arrived, my father had become more a part of the magazine's family than he was our own. Gone for days at a time, he'd bring back copies of the
Lampoon
and leave them lying around the house. The magazine seemed to understand him. In its pages, he could be his passionate and ironic self. For the
Lampoon
's December issue, for instance, my father and another editor, Michael O'Donoghue, created a pair of satirical environmental “mini-posters for your den, study, or rumpus room…each pair carefully Protecto-packed in seventy-six layers of high impact, sixty-pound Dyna-Gloss paper wadding.” Michael's presented a flower with green-back petals and, in a purple, childlike scrawl: “War is not unprofitable
for poster-makers and other living things.” My father's was of a shadowy figure walking through a dense and magical forest. His caption: “This poster looked better as a tree.”

My parents opposed cutting down trees—for Christmas or most any other reason. So my family bundled up a few days before the holiday and trekked into the freezing cold to unearth one.