In Spite of Everything (6 page)

Now, in one sense, it was true: We were both pretty curious (dilettantish), determined (obdurate), and fond of a good laugh. Whether such traits are in fact extraordinary is arguable, and in any case that wasn’t the issue for me as a kid. Simply, my father saw what I was; my mom just couldn’t. Though I know that she loved me, her way of looking at the world was so fundamentally different from mine that we were rarely able to pull off a successful noncognitive transmission. Also, perhaps because I was a girl, as well the namesake of six generations of esteemed Susan Gregorys, she became increasingly distraught as she perceived that with every year, I was failing more and more to fall in line with “the women of our family.” Classic bluestocking ladies, the matriarchs in my lineage conformed not to the Hestia or Demeter archetype but to the Emily Dickinson profile, preferring to choose their own society—a society most often restricted to books and a select group of people who liked to talk about books. That I liked a lot of other things besides books confounded my mother. When I was young, this frustrated her to the extent that her normally weird but loving nicknames for me—“pickle-ator-pumpkin” and “magic muffin”—were often supplanted with “miserable failure,” among others. I now know that she didn’t mean it, but at the time, such characterizations made me feel very bad about who, in fact, I was.

My dad, however, gave genuine thought to my ideas and observations, literally snorted milk out his nose laughing at my jokes, took actual pleasure in my company. I sensed that my dad didn’t love me just because, as my father, he kind of had to; he actually
liked
me. Even as a little kid, I was aware that he did not react this way to everyone. A telltale polite, resigned smile crept across his lips whenever
he was faced with an encounter it became clear he would have to endure, or if someone made a joke he did not find funny. Ian, for example, was often forced to regard Dad’s portrait in blasé tolerance. It was heartbreaking: Ian adored Dad the way a puppy loves his boy. He bounded around, frantically working every angle he could think of to get Dad’s attention, to mimic Dad’s humor. But, as often happens when people get increasingly anxious to please, Ian would overdo it, and that, for Dad—master of the fun and the easy—was an instant deal-breaker. Dad would simply give Ian the smile and move on to the next activity. Once, after a particularly furious bid to get Dad to laugh, Ian exploded. “How come every time
Suze
says something, you think it’s so funny, but every time
I
say something, you don’t?” Dad calmly scooped ice cream into a bowl. “Well, Ian,” he said,
“vive la différence.”

It wasn’t fair, Dad’s treatment of Ian, and I didn’t get anything out of feeling favored. Then again, Ian was, without question, Mom’s darling, and I was inextricably bound to Dad, largely because I needed his protection. Around the time I turned ten, our household became tense, forbidding. My mother had started teaching at Stanford, and the commute from Berkeley was a killer. She wanted to move to Palo Alto. Dad did not. That was all my brother and I knew, factually speaking, but it was clear that Dad was grumbly. A lot more grumbly. His grit and gonzoism began to morph into fierce rigidity and unaccountable black moods. But so far as his interactions with me were concerned, Dad was still noodler-in-chief. Whenever my frenzied, stressed mother was screaming at me after dinner, Dad would simply instruct me to get into the car: “Sit tight, Suze.” I’ll never know what he said to her, but he would burst out of the house, slam the car door, and head for the Berkeley Hills. We’d get out at the summit and observe constellations. “Look at that, old pal,” he said, pointing a thick index finger upward. “That star there, at the tip of Orion, is a
whole other galaxy
.”

I
t was only within the past several years, after a lot of researching and reporting I did for professional journalistic purposes (and therapy for my addled psyche) that I had one of those revelations that instantly illuminate all the murky primal feelings. It emerged from reading I did—with my first baby snuggled next to me on the messy bed—about studies on infant attachment. It’s old news to anyone who has read anything at all about children’s development in the past twenty years or so, but to me, it was flat-out jaw-dropping material. Babies are actually born
needing
to bond to someone—who knew? Renowned pediatrician Penelope Leach cites studies that show that in order to thrive, babies need to attach to a primary caregiver within the first six months of life. Without healthy attachment to such a person, a baby can develop what is called “reactive attachment disorder,” a mental health condition most often seen in cases in which babies or very young children have passed through a succession of different foster care situations, lived in orphanages, or endured prolonged hospitalization; have experienced the sudden death of a parent, or divorce; or have had multiple caregivers, parents or regular caregivers with mental illness or drug and alcohol problems, or mothers with postpartum depression. According to the Mayo Clinic, children with this disorder exhibit one of two types of behavior: “inhibited” (“shunning relationships to virtually everyone”) and “disinhibited” (attempting to “form inappropriate and shallow attachments to virtually everyone, including strangers”). According to Mayo, such children “can’t give or receive affection.”

The good news is that, so far as a baby is concerned, it doesn’t particularly matter if the candidate for attachment is an aunt, an older brother, a grandparent, or a nurse at an orphanage. The only thing that matters is that the person lovingly and consistently attends to the baby’s needs: reading the baby’s cues, responding to them, and, most important, perhaps, taking genuine delight in the tiny creature. In return, that person becomes, to the baby, “mother.”

As my life has lurched forward, my appreciation of this concept has been as helpful as it has been poignant. It illuminates a previously
invisible framework for so many of my decisions and neuroses. It helps to explain why I married the man I married; a big part of why I never, ever would have imagined in a billion years that I would get divorced. I think it also in some way explains why I, like a great many of my Generation X compadres, practiced—and still do—a modified form of “attachment parenting.” And it may also explain why my marriage fell apart a little more than a year after my father died. Because here’s the thing: Until I was ten, my dad
was
my mother.

B
ut when I was eleven, everything changed. After living in Stanford for a year, we moved to the Main Line suburbs of Philadelphia, a blue-blooded territory comprising old estates, debutantes, elite prep schools, and country clubs that excluded minority members. My father had been offered a job with a fast-growing financial services company, and to keep the family together, my mother agreed to the move, giving up her position at Stanford. She hated it. We hated it. The weather was awful, the neighbors were austere and remote—so were the kids, none of whom seemed to ride bikes after school but who were occupied with sports like lacrosse and field hockey. Our house was so big that it took two furnaces to heat, and there was an entire floor that we never used. (After John Lennon was killed, I assumed proprietorship, dedicating the bedrooms to theme shrines devoted to each individual Beatle.) My brother’s room was in a completely separate wing from mine, and it was freezing. He was always getting sick. I felt scared for him, being alone there. Sometimes I would come to check on him on especially cold nights and find him shivering under his polyester-filled comforter, clinging to his elephant stuffie, Harold. I couldn’t understand why our parents didn’t do something.

There was a lot that we didn’t understand.

Although of course she must have, it seemed our mother never got out of bed the first year we lived back east. Being in bed has always
been among her favorite occupations, but this was different. She wasn’t reading metaphysical poetry while half-watching
Perry Mason
. She was always sleeping, always in the same nightgown. “Just get up and come outside with us,” we would urge nervously. “Oh, okay—in a bit,” she would croak. But she never did.

Dad hated it, too. He had always been the most popular guy on the block, the first to break the awkward first moments of a cocktail party with some fantastic story or outlandish observation that yielded laughter and looseness. But his charms were lost on the patriarchs of Main Line Philadelphia. “Goddamned stuffed shirts,” he would growl. “These guys are living off trust funds set up for them in the last century—not one of them has worked an honest day in his life.” More and more, Dad would come home after we were asleep and leave for work before we woke up. He drank more and more. On the nights he was at home, he would fall asleep in front of the TV, his fist still clenching a tumbler of scotch.

But after the first year, Mom got out of bed and got a job as head of the English department at a posh private school. Dad all but vanished, away on business trips. The last time he materialized in the context of our family was for what would turn out to be our last vacation together. We drove up to the Pocono Mountains, where friends had lent us the use of their cabin. Dad brought no climbing gear. “These aren’t mountains,” he snarled. “They’re just shitty hills.” He did, however, bring his telescope; we planned to look at the stars that night. When we arrived, the sun was merciless. Mom went indoors to unpack groceries and read, and Dad sat on the unsheltered patio with a tumbler of scotch, squinting out into the lawn and the field of tall, dead grass that lay beyond it. Ian and I had decided to make a bushwhacking trek into the grass, having been instructed by our mother to pull up our socks to avoid “penetration by ticks.” As we were crossing the yard en route to the field, Ian stopped suddenly. “Look!” he cried. I stopped and scanned. Everywhere, it seemed, there were bunnies, nibbling on stalks of grass and dandelions. Bunnies—they were so little! Their tiny upside-down-Y-shaped
mouths quivered with agonizing cuteness, their hops like miniature lopes. “Look, Dad, look!” we hooted. “Bunnies!” He smiled faintly. “Look at that,” he said. Ian and I bent down and watched them earnestly, as if in that instant we had become charged with their care. After five minutes or so, we heard the first shriek.

It was unworldly, like the scream of the ghost of a murdered child. Ian and I looked at each other, panicked. What had happened? Then there was another shriek, and another. We screamed when we saw them: snakes. Tethers of black snakes were coasting through the grass. There were so many. Ian and I ran wildly, bawling, trying to rescue the bunnies, but our attempts scared them, forcing them into the tall grass, where they were killed. We screamed for our father. Dad ambled onto the lawn and stooped to pick up a twitching bunny, attacked but left behind in the melee. He placed it carefully in the backseat of the car, where it writhed in the sunlight. Ian and I sobbed. My dad folded his arms and looked at the little thing with a sad frown. We tried to feed it some grass, some water. After a few hours, it seemed revived, and Dad told us to set it loose. We did. Within minutes of its disappearing into the tall grass, we heard its shriek.

A thunderstorm rolled in by dinnertime. No stars. That night, I am told, I sleepwalked. I flew from bedroom door to bedroom door, begging at each one: “Let me out! Let me out!”

R
oom. Poems. Gash. Sleepwalking. Stars. Ice.

Dad.

One way in which my personal themes converge with my generation’s is in the primacy of
Star Wars
, which contains the archetypes of home, wounds, stars, ice, and fathers—dark and light. Since having my own children, I’ve thought a lot about
Star Wars
. It came out in 1977, and it is still a huge, huge deal to X. People my age take their
preschoolers
to see it
—three
-year-olds. Why are people my age so attached, in such a primal way, to it? Generation X people, including
me, rarely hesitate when asked to name the defining cultural and developmental turning point of their childhood. Like you have to ask:
Star Wars
, man! It was
huge
. One day, you were a total babe in the woods, a Piagetian changeling. After
Star Wars
, you entered Life. It’s not just that
Star Wars
changed the toy industry, play patterns, the movie and fast-food industries. It was the galvanizing experience of our generation in the way that the anti–Vietnam War movement was for Baby Boomers. But why? Why is it
still
such a huge deal? How did
Star Wars
become a major milestone in our children’s lives, too?
^*

I’ve come to think that the answer may be something like this: If our parents’ divorces were the wars we endured in private,
Star Wars
was the war that unified us culturally. Prompt a grown Gen-X guy, and it’s rarely long before he launches into a play-by-play recon of action scenes in
Star Wars
as though he were an actual veteran. Gen-X women look to Princess Leia as a Rosie the Riveter icon. But I believe that the narrative themes of
Star Wars
were what so deeply resonated with us. Luke Skywalker may have been conceived of by his creators as a prewar Clark Kent–type farm boy, but to 1970s children, he was one of us: the ultimate latchkey kid. He was on his own a lot; he had to handle a bunch of adult responsibilities so the household could function. Then:
kaboom!
His family was destroyed, charred beyond recognition. The mother and father figures were recast instantly, violently. The Oedipal mother figure was now a smart career woman on a serious mission, with no time for crybabies, who looked hot in a Linda Ronstadt kind of way (with the glistening, wine-colored lip gloss). Han Solo was Mom’s cool boyfriend, with his fast, junky-looking bachelor ride; Darth Vader, the terrifying half-human, half-robot Dad, hell-bent on either getting you on his side or destroying you.
Star Wars
might be the epic custody battle of all time.