Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (23 page)

We drove to the party with another couple, maybe because James’s father had taken away his license again. The girl sitting up front was not Dodi as in Will and Dodi, but her friend, the other Dodi. The party itself blurred by years of preceding parties at this house, I now recall only what happened before and after it.

Before the party: Mom put on a cream-colored silk dress and pearls, becoming the mother I’d lost years ago, while Dad broke his policy and came into the house to deliver his gifts to us. I remember well the pink blouse that tied at the neck and the white sweater with a snowflake design. Since he’d chosen these gifts on his own I wore them often, feeling both closer and farther from my father—in colors appropriate for a girl younger than I saw myself at seventeen, but with a bow at the neck to herald the career woman I might someday become.

And after the party: James kissed me in the back seat of his friend’s car for the whole drive home. For those twenty minutes I burrowed my fingers into his curls and touched his face, saying to myself, “Last time.” I didn’t care that one of the Dodis was in the front seat. More startling to me was that when she glanced back, I could have sworn that her expression was sympathetic. As we pulled into my driveway, I slipped the note from my purse and set it on the seat between us. James stared at it, bewildered.

“For later,” I said, pushing the note his way. I told him not to walk me to the door, but he insisted. On my back porch, he searched my face with questioning eyes. Then he kissed me goodnight as if he understood this was the end.

I assumed that I wouldn’t hear from James again, and the next day I sulked in Liz’s old room while listening to “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” I must have played it forty times, when the phone rang. I picked up, heard James’s voice, and rolled off the bed, taking several books down as I attempted to grab hold of the bookshelf on my way.

“What was that?” he said.

“What was what?” I said from a pile of books on the floor, my breath choppy with nervous energy.

“Never mind,” he said, and then he threw me off by going right to the thing I had not imagined he would ever discuss. “Listen, do you want to talk about this letter?”

I hesitated for an instant. How likely was he to do any of the talking? Or what if he said he didn’t have the same feelings for me?

“No,” I said.

“No?” I heard disbelief in his voice.

I wanted him to say he felt the same way, or that we were too young, or to at least acknowledge that my feelings were understandable. But, just as in my relationship with my father, there was an awkward silence coming from the other end of the line. Please tell me yes, we have to talk about it! But nothing came.

This time I tried to sound harsh. “No.”

“Okay,” he said.

Unable to grasp what had just transpired, I found myself drifting on to gossip with him. We laughed about mutual friends in the same way we had when we first met. It seemed as if nothing had changed. The tone as we hung up was not unlike other conversations we’d had, except that once I set the receiver in its cradle I knew that we were really saying goodbye.

M
y mother’s walk grew sturdier as she gained confidence in herself, dressing up daily as if she were going on a date with Dad. She pulled herself together with silks and linens, an up-do, lipstick. When Dad drove up on Sundays, she came out to the car. Sometimes she chatted and left. Other times, she invited him into the house. He consistently rejected her offers, but she kept trying.

Over the next year, Dad began to shop for a house of his own, one large enough so that he could take custody of the youngest children. Then, in a preemptive strike probably prompted by my mother, all eleven of us children met with her psychiatrist. The smallest children yanked at their clothing. Tim, the toughest of them, shielded his face with his T-shirt, his shoulders shaking as tears soaked the cloth, while the eldest of these three, Matthew, looked on with the face of a forty-year-old man. Nina, our brown-eyed love bug, so tranquil and pale-skinned, was frazzled. Seeing our “babies” in pain made us older kids feel inept. We’d all played a role in raising them and, as I glanced around the room, I found other faces reflecting my own consternation.

Dad must have picked up on our anger. Maybe it forced him to weigh his options. He started to accept Mom’s invitations to come into the house when he dropped off the kids. I was afraid to hope for it, but I wondered if, given a little space and time, even his wound might heal.

CHAPTER 16

Venus Rises (Having Gotten a Lift from Dr. T. J. Eckleburg)

T
hrough the leaves at the head of the trail, I glimpsed the last rays of sun as they lit up the dance floor inside the fraternity house. “At least it’s a Hawaiian theme,” I said to Gretchen. “We can pretend we’re somewhere else.” It was the last month of my freshman year, and I still had not accepted the fact that I’d had to stay in town for college. Gretchen shook her head in disapproval. She was happy here at the University of Cincinnati, or maybe she was remembering our spring break. “Don’t get any big ideas on the dance floor tonight,” she said. “It’s getting hard to keep track of all of you.”

My disco story was still traveling across campus, an incendiary bomb which I’d launched myself in what was turning out to be a successful attempt at damage control. People I’d never met were now greeting me with gusto: “I heard about
your
spring break!” To which I would say, “Took my legs and threw them over here ... took my chest and threw it over there.” Some people would laugh at my reference to the scarecrow, but others would look at me as if I were describing an incident too brutal to mention in public. Either way I felt somehow superior for having survived the experience. Indignity, I was finding out, could be worn as a cloak of fame, at least in college.

After the last hearty push from Gretchen, I reached the top of the path and stepped into the Betas’ backyard. It was a year since the boil had formed. I was still jamming the leg on, sinking my weight into it despite the shock of pain, and waiting for numbness to take over. Numbness had become my closest ally, if not my greatest threat.

To this party for my pledge class I wore a sundress—red with white hibiscus flowers. My hair was pinned up on one side with a white flower; the rest was a tumble of curls. Optimistic young Betas handed us each a glass of punch, which—I should have known by now, my second semester—was always a mistake. Invariably they spiked the punch with grain alcohol. Often, to Liz’s horror, I would suck the drink down. This night was no exception.

The tradition in our family until Liz, Frank, and I graduated from high school was to go away to college. Liz and Frank didn’t mind staying in town because their friends had stayed, but most of my friends were away at school. I wrote tear-stained letters, usually after a party, to Claire in Louisiana. “Get me out of here,” was the repeated refrain on those pages, some dappled with cheap wine.

After sunset, the party crowd thinned or moved into the house. On about my third glass of punch, a blurry vision crossed the dance floor. “Not James,” I said, blinking. James belonged to a rival fraternity and was dating a sophomore. I still couldn’t take in the fact that he had been set up with Liz’s “little sister” from the sorority. Whose idea was that? I didn’t want to ferret out that information. Maybe James had just seen this girl from across the room and had to have her. But did it have to happen just before I arrived on campus? And just before I was funneled into Liz’s sorority? Because everyone in the fraternity system knew Liz, there was no other sorority that was going to take a chance on me. The others assumed that of course I would join Liz’s sorority. That assumption was partially correct. No one revered Liz more than I did, which made the combination of her “little sister” and James particularly painful. As a result of this setup, Liz’s sorority became the last sorority I needed to join. Now I saw the couple everywhere, usually sweeping out of the sorority parking lot in James’s brother’s Camaro. Worse still, my apartment—actually my bedroom—overlooked that parking lot.

A wiser girl might have left this party upon spotting James. But two things kept me there: one was the downhill path in the woods leading back to my apartment. I couldn’t possibly make it down alone. Then there was the apartment itself. My life there was a calamity, and I was doing my best to avoid going home to it. My choice to move in with Liz and two of her friends was a mistake that had seemed harmless at the time. Now, on weekends when Liz’s boyfriend came to town, I would have to sleep on the couch, which was awkward with roommates coming in at all hours, my legs on the floor, and boyfriends stepping over them. My brilliant solution was to inebriate myself and pass out on the couch, making it less awkward for boyfriends and whatnot to step around me. I aimed for memory loss. Given the potency of the Betas’ punch, I was now half a drink away from my target point.

Why was I in this apartment in the first place? Liz had thought it would be good for me. She pointed out that a dorm might be awkward since I didn’t have legs. I’d actually been looking forward to making friends in a dorm, but I had to agree that that was something I hadn’t considered. Our parents agreed, so much so that Dad gave us a car. Unfortunately, it was a stick shift, which was impossible for me to drive as I could only use one leg to drive. Maybe it was the only car on the lot. Or maybe he gave us one that I couldn’t drive because he was afraid I would crash it. That would have been a reasonable assumption at the time. In any case, the campus and especially the apartment became in my mind a prison.

I would complain to Liz, “You never said I would have to sleep on the couch.” To which she would say, “What’s the difference? You stagger home every night. Half the time you don’t even know where you are.”

I could hardly argue that point. So I made running lists in my head. People make lists when they are disoriented, preparing for change, and/or about to die. I had at least two of those factors pressing on me, and my lists included these four keys to my survival: one, writing short stories; two, taking in the German- and Italian-inspired architecture around campus so that I might conjure the feeling of being far from home; three, watching
General Hospital
with a roommate, who was, thankfully, Colette; and four, plotting my escape.

As for writing, I preferred the oak table in the library at the sorority house, where I used the electric typewriter that Dad had given me for my high school graduation present—his olive branch. “You should have this. You should write,” he’d said economically—I heard that word a lot in my writing classes, all taught by men.

Having grown up in a busy household, my creativity flourished in a room where people milled around like shadows moving with the sun. Sometimes I would look up to summon an image or a smell, only to find James holding Liz’s little sister’s hand in the window seat. If he happened to catch my eye or vice versa, I’d smile at the page where I took my revenge: James in various guises, posing as a devil and smelling of fetid fruit ... no, of death.

My second-favorite escape came in the form of architecture. As a small child I’d learned to focus on the buildings in Walnut Hills while Mom pulled up to the leg man’s shop. A good stained-glass window takes the edge off when you know an ancient man is about to knead wet plaster over your thigh. The university is between Walnut Hills and Clifton, both areas full of Germanic houses with thatched or tiled roofs. Down Clifton Avenue is the Gaslight district, where Italianate Victorians were offset by an old-fashioned ice cream parlor, a German bakery, and a florist. The architecture transported me, but then there were the familiar faces within those walls.

No matter where I turned on this campus of roughly 20,000 students, I managed to find James in all his glory. His father, who taught at the medical school, had bought a house for his sons, which happened to be right next to the sorority notorious on our campus for girls who graduated with the largest diamond engagement rings—a perfect setup for the Cabrera boys, who would be shoe-ins at the medical school. Welcomed everywhere, apparently, James moved through the Betas’ party as if it were for him. Upon seeing his face, my throat dried into a knot. I’d never lost this reaction to him. It was bad enough that we kept running into each other, but did he have to keep pointing out my newly acquired foibles? The “freshman ten” I’d gained, the endless drunken stupors, and the yoke of self-hatred I refused to take off.

Earlier that year, over Christmas break, James had called me at my parents’ house to see if I wanted to go on a double date with his friend. “I think we’ve already tried that combination,” I thought, but I agreed to go, only to get drunk across the table from James and Liz’s little sister, after which he and my date watched me do a Dick Van Dyke somersault over the sofa before my date gathered me up and drove me home.

Here on the fraternity patio, a naïve Beta handed me a drink. Then James was in my face. I backed up and fell into a rosebush. He reached in and plucked me out. Fresh scratches on my arms began to weep.

“You’re drunk,” he said.

“Don’t you have a girlfriend to pick on?”

The look on his face suggested that maybe he didn’t.

“You need to go. I’ll take you home.”

“Economical. Concise,” I whispered to myself as he led me around the side of the house.

I saw his car and started limping away, losing a limb in the shrubbery of the side yard where thankfully only James was my witness. “Who said you could boss me around?” I whispered as I fastened on my leg and climbed up to a standing position.

“Just get in the car.”

Then, with arms outstretched in a martyr pose that rivaled my mother’s, I screamed, “I’m not going with you!”

“You’re gonna walk down that hill by yourself?” He pointed to the dark trail at the mouth of the woods.

I got in his car. At a stoplight I escaped. I’d like to think I leapt out; instead, I opened the door and toppled out.

James, determined to do the right thing, followed me home. Driving on the wrong side of Clifton Avenue, he tried to talk me down. I was gleeful as he faced two-lane traffic head-on and only disappointed that at this late hour there was no traffic. I passed his house and half of fraternity row until he whipped into a driveway, cutting me off. I turned to limp in the opposite direction, but this time he got out and ushered me back to the car. “You can’t even walk,” he said. “I’m not leaving you out here.”