How to Cook Your Daughter (6 page)

The full-page color picture appeared in the next issue with the caption “THIS MUST STOP!” My father looks pathetic and vulnerable, his white skin almost translucent. My mother towers over him—menacing, armed, ruthless, and in a position of power, a place she never claimed during their marriage. I suppose some kids might have been horrified by the image. Not me. I was just glad Daddy was home, and that he wasn't being hurt for real. No matter what might be happening around us, at least I knew where he was. For me, that was all that really mattered.

By that winter, the
Lampoon
had become a family affair—Mom in the baby seal picture, Kathy with her sketches for her “How to Cook Your Father” piece, and me for my damnation-earning portrayal of a truculent Christian on
Radio Dinner
, the record that God would be listening to soon. Daddy hadn't just brought his work home. He brought the staff along with it. Together they seemed to embolden each other in all the worst ways. They were playful and fun, but even their humor quickly turned dark and angry. They pushed each other to push the limits. And they brought into our already peculiar house, a lifestyle that seemed epitomized by the
Lampoon
's January 1972 edition, an issue my father conceived. It was entitled, “Is Nothing Sacred?”

Not surprising, the answer for him and others on the staff was a resounding “no.” The cover featured the favorite dorm poster of Che Guevara with a dripping cream pie in the face. Inside were child abuse and molestation jokes, a Son-of-God comic book, Martin Luther King on a target, and a Virgin Mary dildo. My father seemed especially proud of the edition. Like “How to Cook Your Daughter,” he saw it as some of his best, most biting work.

Henry Beard was the first member of the
Lampoon
staff to come to the New Jersey house. Later, when I read
Catcher in the Rye
, I thought immediately of Henry, a grown-up version of Holden Caulfield with his black glasses, shabby docksiders, and rumpled yachting attire. Henry kept his dark hair short at a time when the other guys in his club were letting it down. Doug Kenney wore it shoulder length and occasionally in a pony tail. Michael O'Donoghue let his hair grow, as did Sean Kelly, my father, and everyone one else I can think of. In the
Lampoon
's midtown office, sitting behind his desk, Henry resembled a mad scientist overseeing a group of scraggly orderlies.

At twenty-four, Henry was already executive editor of the
Lampoon
. The magazine had become my father's sole source of income, though he was still just a contributing editor. So, for all its seeming lack of formality, Henry's visit was, for my mother, a version of the boss coming to dinner. When he stepped off the bus from New York, his pipe was already firmly entrenched in his mouth. Without comment, he took in the VW, the barren countryside, the house, and Kathy and me. Families, in any form, were an aberration at the
Lampoon,
and Henry did not seem to know quite what to make of us. Besides, he was at an age where having children seemed inconceivable.

He sat close to the fireplace to defend against the chill of the rest of the house. In the years to come, our winter visitors adopted the same strategy to stay warm—knocking themselves out through lack of oxygen, and falling asleep on the sofa. Henry, however, managed to stay awake, chatting with my dad and, of course, smoking his pipe. Kathy and I tiptoed in and out of the kitchen, where my mother was cooking a chicken, to take mute peeks at the visitor. Half an hour after the propane gas tank emptied, my mother pulled a perfectly half-done chicken from an oven that had gone cold.

Kathy and I watched as she tossed lit matches under the broiler plate, trying over and over again to relight the stove. “Oh shit!” she said, emerging from underneath the oven. I could see she was thinking. But what were her options, really? This was rural New Jersey, and it was 9:00
P.M
. at night. Even if there had been somewhere to eat that was still open, we couldn't take the boss there, not even a boss like Henry.

Then it dawned on her. And really, it was the only option. She picked up the chicken pan and carried it into the living room. “The fuckers forgot to deliver the gas!” she explained. And with Elizabethan ingenuity, guest and hosts skewered the chicken with the poker and took turns holding it over the flames. Dinner was served promptly at 10:30
P.M
. Kathy and I could barely keep our eyes open.

After that dinner, I always liked Henry. I'll never forget the image of him roasting a chicken on a poker over an open fire—the mad scientist goes camping. And I came to like him more as my family's life with the
Lampoon
progressed during the next few years. In large part that was because, as drugs became a fixture in everyone's life, Henry stuck to his pipe and filled it only with tobacco—at least on his visits to our house. Henry waited until spring to come again, and by then, my dad had been hired on full-time.

Even Michael O'Donoghue, who hated the cold, came to stay in New Jersey with his girlfriend, Amy. He spent the entire weekend huddled by the fireplace, complaining. In contrast, my father made a point of getting up in the morning and immediately heading out of the house. He tramped through the snow and chopped firewood, showing off his skills as an outdoorsman, though for whom wasn't clear until later. But on that Sunday afternoon, my father and Amy conspired to get Michael outside regardless. They grabbed him and, with my
mother's help, hoisted him out of the warm refuge he had made for himself on the sofa. Grasping his arms and legs and deaf to his protestations, they carried him through the front door of the house and pitched him into the snow, laughing all the while. I laughed with them, but the scene seemed even more unnerving than seeing my naked father lying in a pool of fake blood. Michael was my father's good friend, so why were they ganging up on him like that? Of course, I couldn't understand the sexual tension that had surfaced between Michael, Amy, and my father—a tension that would soon ruin their relationship.

But Michael's humiliation added to the feeling I already had: To my father, the joke was
always
more important than the feelings that it hurt. I still loved him, maybe more desperately than ever. And that's why I didn't want him to leave the house that night in April—the night he crawled into bed with me and changed my life forever.

THAT'S WHAT PEOPLE DO WHEN THEY LOVE EACH
other.

I needed to remind myself of that. To say those words over and over again—the words that Daddy had said the night before. At least he had stayed. At least I had kept him from going into the city and coming back who knew when.

My dad rested on a white wicker chair on the porch of the little house across the road from ours. We called the place the Forge because it had once been the workplace of the blacksmith who had built our home. When my parents bought our place, the man who had been my dad's comedy partner, Nick Ullett, bought the Forge. But Nick never used it, so we kept it up for him. Kathy and I loved the wide porch in back. It jutted over the river, and we could fish from it, not that we ever managed to catch anything. The Forge was to be rented out for the spring and summer to Daddy's boss, Henry Beard, and Daddy had taken me by the hand to help him sweep out the cobwebs of winter in preparation for Henry's arrival.

We didn't talk much while we cleaned. I didn't know what to say. And as the sun set and my dad rested, I looked over at him and thought about what he had told me last night while he lay next to me in bed: “That's what people do when they love each other.”

And I did. I loved him so much. More than I loved anyone on earth. So why did I feel so scared? And so ashamed? I tried squeezing my eyes tight against the tears, willing them back. My lips started to quiver, and I pressed my mouth shut. My father must have noticed.

“Treasure, come over here and sit with me.”

I looked at him and realized that, for the first time in my life, I didn't want to. For the first time, I didn't want to be on his lap, in his arms, against his chest. But as I had the night before, I did as he asked. I walked slowly across the porch and sat stiffly on his lap.

“I am an asshole, Jessie, a drunken asshole.”

I looked into his eyes, and I could smell the cigars he smoked mixed with his sweat—just as I had last night. Then I burst into tears. Daddy said nothing more, and when I stopped crying, he took me by the hand and we walked back across the road.

What was he trying to tell me? That he was sorry about what happened? But why? Wasn't it what people did when they loved each other? Why should he be sorry then?
My head spun. I didn't understand what we had done. And I couldn't figure out how I was supposed to feel about it.
Daddy
wasn't
an asshole. It must've been
my
fault. He must've seen me there crying and thought that maybe I didn't love him anymore.

I didn't know what to think, how to feel. I just knew things had changed with my father. And the nightmares came for the first time soon after.

It's dark and I'm in the house alone, wearing the same nightgown
he had made me take off the night before. Every room is dimly lit, as though the bulbs have been switched from 175 watts to fifteen. I look out the kitchen window and see a shape by the barn. It moves toward the house, toward me, and I know that it wants to hurt me. Maybe it's a man, but it seems like a monster, and I run to the kitchen door. I try to lock it, but the bolt won't budge. The door flies open and becomes so heavy that I can't push it shut. So I run into the empty living room and try to lock the side door. The old, rusty hinges break off, disintegrating in my hands, and I sense the monster coming closer. I run up the narrow stairs to my parents' room. The windows are wide open, and like the door downstairs, have become too heavy to shut. I look out their window and suddenly a bright spotlight falls on the figure. It's a man whose face I can't see. I'm petrified. The kitchen door is wide open. The hinges in the living room have fallen to dust. The windows won't budge. There's no way to keep the man out.

Or the other dream:

I'm stuck in a deep hole, a well maybe. I can just barely see the sky. The hole smells musty and damp, and it's so small I can't lie down. My knees are pressed to my chin; my arms are pinned to my sides. My hair covers my face, and I gasp for air. Then I hear voices. My mother! My sister, Kathy! They're looking for me, and I hear them walking around the hole calling, “Jessie! Jessie, where are you?” I try to call out to them: “I'm here! Look down! I'm right here in this hole! Help me! Please help me get out!” But when I open my mouth, no sound comes. I strain and strain, but I can only hear myself whisper. I know then that they will never hear me, that I'll be stuck in the hole forever.

I began sleepwalking. Some mornings, I woke to find objects tucked into the corner of my bed: a rolling pin from the kitchen, a bar
of soap, a wooden duck figurine that had been on one of the shelves in the living room, the china eggs that went with it. I never understood why I had taken them. I was like a six-and-a-half-year-old Lady Macbeth.

Of course, I told no one. How could I? What would I tell them? That Daddy had made me do things I didn't understand? “That's what people do when they love each other,” he had said. In my heart, I so desperately wanted to believe him. But my head seemed unwilling to let me. And that conflict, that irreconcilable conflict, began to take its toll.

I never liked Lebanon Township Jail, but now I felt terrified to go to school. And to the ballet class I had always loved. And of being outside at all. My ballet teacher tried everything to get me to come back to the dance studio, but I went into near hysterics at the idea. I clung to my mother and had to be carried sobbing back to the car. I didn't even understand why.

I grew attached to my mom, even though I never considered confiding in her. How would I explain something I didn't understand? I had always adored my father, and even if I had thought that what he'd done was wrong, I had no illusions about my mother standing up to him. So instead, I simply hid. When she took Kathy to school in the mornings, my shame kept me in the Scout. All of us had conjunctivitis that spring, and I had gotten a very bad case. I knew what pinkeye looked like, so I used it as a way to stay home. I'd wake up in the early morning darkness and sneak down the ladder of the bunk beds I shared with Kathy. Then I'd tiptoe into the bathroom off the landing, shut the door, and switch on the light. I was still too short to see my reflection in the mirror, so I'd position a stool to stand on. I'd lean toward the mirror and go to work on my eye. I chose the right eye because I could barely see out of it anyway. (Kathy and I had both
inherited my father's astigmatism). First, I would tuck all my hair behind my ears. Then I'd use my index finger to rub all over the eye—on the lid and on the soft skin underneath. The rubbing burned, but I needed to look convincing. When it almost glowed red, when the white looked completely bloodshot and the skin around it raw, I would stop to inspect. Then I would spit on my hand and rub the saliva over the entire area. I hoped it would look like pus. Sometimes, if I had some of the little specks of sleep on my eyelashes, I would carefully collect them in the palm of my hand and press them into the corner of my eye to make it look crusty.

When I was satisfied, I would climb off the stool and head back to my bunk. Then I'd lie down very carefully, positioning my head just so on the pillow. It was critical that none of the crust I'd created fell off my eye. If it did, I might be sent to school.

When I heard my mom getting up in the next room, I would give my eye one final, careful rubbing just in case the redness had started to fade. She usually woke up alone; Daddy had begun spending entire weeks in the city.

“Mommy, my eye still hurts!” I'd tell her.

She would peer at me. “Well, it still looks bad.” The fateful pause. Then: “You'd better stay home.”

Relief.

I was always nervous that when we dropped Kathy off at school, one of the teachers might run out to the Scout, grab me, and force me into the building. I would hide as best I could, sometimes covering myself with my jacket. But no one ever came out. They had clearly given up on me.

Back home, without my dad around, I headed upstairs to my room to lose myself in a make-believe world—the sort I could control.
Inside the walls of my Victorian dollhouse sat delicate furniture from a store in New York. Each room was full of tiny replicas—plush nineteenth-century sofas, mahogany tables, and porcelain bathtubs with tiny claw feet. I had minute plates of food: iced cakes, loaves of bread, cheese boards, and whole chickens. I wanted nothing modern, especially the family that lived in the house. The mother wore a long Victorian dress, the mustachioed father a dark suit, the children black button shoes. They had a nursery with cozy brass beds, a rocking horse, and thumbnail-size copies of Kate Greenaway books. My house even had a nanny, bedecked with a black cap. I camped next to the house, sticking my face into their living room, admiring the straight-backed, red, velvet sofa, the tiny grandfather clock, and the fake wood burning in the fire place. The nurse became Mary Poppins and sent the little girl and boy up to their beds in the nursery. I pretended that she was tucking me in along with them, kissing me on the forehead. “Spit spot into bed,” I made her say. And none of them had pinkeye.

My mother pried me away from that world long enough to take me to the doctor. If he thought my pinkeye was fake, he didn't let on. He prescribed drops that would cure conjunctivitis, but of course they wouldn't work on me. After weeks and weeks of the morning rubbing ritual, Mommy suspected I was making up my illness—mainly because my conjunctivitis always got mysteriously better on Saturday but worse on Monday. But she thought it simply had to do with how much I hated school, and she arranged for Kathy and me to transfer in the fall. I doubt she had the emotional energy to examine what was going on with me anyway. Looking back, I'm not sure she truly wanted to be a mother—not then, when she was surrounded by a group of creative singles looking to make their way in the world. Here she was, shuttling us to school and packing sack lunches. There they were, free
to do as they pleased—and her husband ran with them. For her, just getting through the day had become a challenge.

I don't know if my mother knew of Daddy's many affairs, but everyone at the
Lampoon
did. The tryst my father had with Michael O'Donoghue's girlfriend plunged the office into chaos, and the rift between the two men quickly became public. It wasn't the first time Michael and my dad had shared a woman. It was just that this time, Michael was furious at what he saw as a betrayal. My father tried to smooth things over at first. In a letter he wrote to Michael that my mother showed me recently, he even came close to apologizing:

Even in trying to apologize, it was all about my father—how
he
wasn't enjoying the drama, how squeezing out Michael would've been suicidal for
him
. My mom believes Michael opened the letter, read it, and returned it without comment. Writing years later about the affair and subsequent falling-out, my father adopts a more indifferent tone: “Now in the hip-happening, going-too-far, nothing-is-sacred, dish-it-out world of the 1972
Lampoon,
this sort of thing had happened once
or twice before…. The line between loyalties and love were very indistinct, and claims on people made no sense.”

Maybe for him, but not for O'Donoghue, who demanded a complete, unequivocal apology from his former friend. “He seemed to be trying to will me to admit a wrong, a terrible wrong, an immeasurably terrible wrong and then die,” my father wrote later.

Michael should have known what I have come to accept: Admitting terrible wrongs is far beyond my father.

The situation escalated, the
Lampoon
offices divided, the adversaries avoided each other until, finally, a confrontation. According to my dad, Michael's last words to him were: “You're slime, Hendra. I hate you! You're scum, you hear? Nothing but scum, slime!” My mother, however, was never one for showdowns. The affair, and in fact all the affairs, must have hurt her deeply. But she dealt with my father's behavior by avoiding it. She didn't want to know. She didn't want to see. She didn't want to hear. While the
Lampoon
offices were filled with high emotion, Mom stayed silent and absorbed the blows, as if she were on the seal's end of that
Lampoon
photo shoot. My not wanting to go to school occupied the tiniest corner of her mind. So I remained inside my dollhouse and missed the last month and a half of first grade.

Kathy found my “illness” irritating. “You're always getting to stay home, and I have to go to stupid school!” she yelled at me one evening as we fought over who got to sit closest to the tiny black-and-white television that my parents, with reservations, had finally purchased. They were, I suppose, ambivalent about television. My mother wasn't interested in it, and my father regarded it as emblematic of the stupidity of American culture (perhaps because he had had no success writing for it). Once we had one, however, he got sucked in too. An insomniac,
he often spent long nights glued to the tube. As a family, we watched
Monty Python's Flying Circus
. Mom and Daddy had gone to Cambridge with almost the entire cast, and my father naturally had a professional interest in what was probably the most innovative comedy on television. Still, he couldn't help but warn us of the terrible “brain rot” we would get from watching too much. And like many things my father said, suddenly this thing, this “brain rot,” concerned me. After an hour of Saturday morning cartoons, I worried I had caught it. When my mother read Kathy and me
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
I was astounded to hear a whole song devoted to the ills of watching television.