The Aqua Net Diaries (29 page)

Jennifer, her parents, and their dog Jamey

First of all let me tell you about my family. My father Jack, my mother Penny, my cat Princess, my cat Michael, and my dog Jamey. Also myself, Jennifer.

—Jennifer McJunkin, “My Life in Indiana,” September 25, 1977

When I was little, I used to play a game. I would try to decide who I would live with if my parents split up. It was a game I took very seriously, largely because I knew it would never happen. I would lie in bed or in my green beanbag and really think about it.

I knew I would probably choose my mom because she and I were so alike. We both laughed and had fun. She was bright and bubbly. Every night before I went to bed, she told me she loved me. She told me again in the morning. She
said she wanted it to be the first thing I heard when I woke up and the last thing I heard before I went to sleep. Everyone loved her, most of all me. My dad was quieter, more intense, more brooding. He worked all the time and got impatient because many things got on his nerves.

But he and I were alike, too. I had his brown hair and brown-green eyes that looked more brown than green but were really more green than brown. I had his stubbornness and his short temper. He was also more relaxed than my mom about some things—he got my mom to loosen up and not watch me so closely and let me be. He was less perfect than my mom, more openly and obviously flawed, and I knew I was that way, too. No one was as perfect as my mom.

Mom was also a writer, and this was something I was thinking about being. Writing was certainly something I liked doing, ever since I was a little girl and she had instilled writing time into my daily routine. My mother was the director of the Carl Sandburg Oral History Project. She had organized his papers at his North Carolina home, Connemara, and traveled the country interviewing people who knew Sandburg—Gene Kelly and Steve Allen, whom we met in Los Angeles; musician Pete Seeger, who stayed at our house in Hidden Valley; journalist Harry Golden; and even a man in Chicago who had just gotten out of prison for murdering his wife. My dad hovered around during that interview in case my mom needed protection, and I hovered around just in case I could hear something about his time in prison. She made speeches at universities and historical societies and now she was writing a book on Sandburg—the first comprehensive biography of him ever written. Sandburg's own agent, Lucy Kroll, was representing her. My mother's work was horribly exciting.

I loved my dad. When I was little, we were the best of friends. We were more playmates than father-daughter. We got into mischief together and pulled silly pranks on each other and got into trouble with my mom. But as I grew older, we suddenly had very little to talk about. He didn't want to hear about boys and he didn't like my music. My mom would say, “Give it a chance, Jack.” And he would say, “That isn't music. How can you listen to it with her?” And Mom would say, “Because Jennifer is interested in it and I'm interested in Jennifer.”

My dad was an only child, too, and we were sometimes competitive. When I was little, my mom had to talk to him about letting me win at Uncle Wiggly and Chutes & Ladders. “For God's sake, Jack,” she would say. “She is a five-year-old girl.” But this didn't matter to him. Whatever game we played, my dad wanted to win, and I was the same exact way. Whoever lost would fall into a deep, dark sulk, so silent and forbidding that no one could speak to us for hours after the game was over.

Worse than this, my father ate all the good things that came into the house, hoarding them like a squirrel gathering food for the winter. Whenever there was anything delicious to eat—cookies or lemon bars or cheese biscuits or cupcakes from Joy Ann Bakery—my mom had to dole out fair and equal shares of them (drawing a line down the pan of lemon bars and carving “J” for Jennifer on one side, and “D” for Dad on the other) and then hide the rest somewhere in the kitchen so that my dad wouldn't eat them all. He always, always found them, though, and ate well into my share and my mother's. I would climb up onto the kitchen counter and reach into the very back of the cabinet and pull out the white bakery box, and there would be only three cookies
where before there had been eight. In times like these, my mom would give me her share and what, if anything, was left of mine. She almost never got a delicious thing to eat herself.

And my dad was busy. He was the busiest man I knew. In addition to working at Earlham as the business manager and as the director of planned giving (jobs he did simultaneously and which I never understood no matter how many times he explained them to me), he taught Asian history and religion and a squash course at the gym. He chaired the faculty nominating committee, the first administrator to be elected by the faculty to that position, among other committees. He served on the boards of the local mental health center and the Richmond Symphony Orchestra, ran at least five miles daily, if not more—twenty-six on weekends. And to top it all off, he was always cooking. He was widely acclaimed in East Central Indiana for his culinary skill. (My parents had even written a cookbook together—
The I Hate to Chew Cookbook: A Gourmet Guide for Adults Who Wear Braces,
inspired by my mom getting braces at age forty. Then my parents and I wrote
Teen Cuisine: A Cookbook for Young People Who Wear Braces.
) My dad could whip up shrimp bisque or Marchand di Vin for sixty people easily, and was always trying to teach me the right wine to go with beef Wellington. This was maddening because when you are a teenager, all you want to eat are normal things like hamburgers and Kraft Macaroni & Cheese out of the box. My father made his macaroni and cheese from scratch. It took hours. He even made the noodles by hand.

Time and again, I decided that I would definitely live with my mother.

•  •  •

One day, toward the end of my senior year, I was standing on my head, trying to reach the Men at Work album that had fallen behind my bookcase. There was a knock at the door.

“Come in!” I yelled.

There was a pause, and then the door opened and my father walked in. I immediately tried to think of what I might have done wrong because he never came to my room. He didn't like the clutter—the clothes everywhere and the glasses that needed washing. He didn't like the posters of boys and rock stars that hung on my walls, and he didn't like the music I was always playing on the stereo he had built for me himself out of the finest hi-fi components.

“Jenge?” It was his private nickname for me, based on the name I called myself when I was little, in the days before I could pronounce Jennifer.

“Yes?”

“I need to talk to you,” he said.

“Okay.” I sat down on my bed and he sat next to me.

We sat there a long time in silence until finally he said, “I don't want you to think that there's anyone else. It's important that you know that. But your mother and I are separating, and she wanted me to tell you because it's not her idea, it's my idea. I just can't. I just can't have a family right now. It isn't you and it isn't her. It's me.”

Your mother and I are separating.

I felt as if I had been slammed in the head with something, like the time my junior high school gym teacher made me guard Jody Starn in basketball, all three hundred pounds of her, and she had sent me flying into the gym wall. I tried not to cry because my dad hated tears more than he hated my music and my boy talk. I thought about Alex Delaney's
parents who never got along and how I had felt so sorry for him. I thought about Laura's parents—her mom in Dayton, her dad always gone. I sat there thinking about how your entire life could change in an instant.

“We are going to stay together for the rest of your senior year. We don't want you to have that disruption. We'll stay here together in this house, and after you graduate, we'll separate. But you cannot tell anyone, not even Joey. We don't want this getting out into the community. We have to entertain together for my work. We don't want people talking.”

I didn't say anything or ask anything. I just sat there, staring at the yellow of my bedspread, thinking how bright it was, wondering why I'd never asked to paint my green walls when I didn't even like green, I liked purple.

“I'm so sorry,” he said. “I'm so sorry.”

And I realized I was crying, and, worse, he was crying, which was something I had never seen my dad do except when our Scottish terrier, Jamey, died, and that I had expected because he loved Jamey, probably even more than he loved my mom and me.

He hugged me then, and it wasn't awkward. It was wonderful. I couldn't remember the last time he'd hugged me. I used to ride around on his shoulders as a little girl and pat him on his bald head. I used to hold on to his arms—tanned with golden hairs that turned copper in the sun—when I was learning to skate.

He pulled away and then my mother came in and she was crying, too. My dad left and my mom sat down and she and I just cried and cried. But even then, I didn't believe it.
This is not happening,
I kept thinking,
this is not real. This can't happen, not to us.

The next day, everything was like normal. My dad got up and I got up and my mom had been up for hours. The three of us sat at the breakfast table not talking because my dad and I were not morning people and didn't like to talk before eleven a.m. My mom hummed to herself and tried to subdue her morning energy.

Later, my mom told me we could talk if I wanted to, that it was important to talk and get things out. “You have to let the tears come,” she always said. “Because if you don't, they will come out eventually—in depression, in anger, yelling, slamming doors, throwing a hairbrush against the wall,” which was something I had been known to do. But I told her I was fine.

I went up to my green room and called Joey.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“Nothing,” I said.

“What's going on?” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “Nothing much.” It was the start of keeping things in, of holding them inside and not sharing them with the people closest to me. It stung then like a fresh slap, but it would become easier and easier with time.

He said, “Do you want to go to a movie? I think I can get the car.” Sometimes Joey had to share the car with his brother Mitchell, and we couldn't always have it when we needed it.

I said, “Okay.”

He said, “Or we can go to Dayton instead.”

I thought of driving fast and Billy Idol and turning the music up loud, loud, loud, and I said, “That sounds better.”

He said, “I'll be there soon.” We hung up and I waited in my room, watching out the window for Joey, so I wouldn't have to sit downstairs and talk to my mom.

Matt Ashton, Jennifer McJunkin, Hillary Moretti, Jennie Burton, Joey Kraemer, Diane Armiger, Brian Yoder, Danny Allen, Ricky Grimes, and unidentified girl—where Laura Lonigro should be—at prom

My dress is beautiful! Wonderful! Gorgeous! It's white and light blue (striped) Gunne Sax. It's kind of a Scarlett O'Hara kick-ass dress. What does yours look like, Hill?

My dress is plain and pink and pitiful. (If the shoe fits … )

—Jennifer and Hillary, exchanging notes in Russian Literature

Our prom, the fifty-third Richmond High School prom, was held at an off-school site for the first time since the 1930s—in the Stardust Ballroom of the newly renovated Radisson Hotel (the old Leland Hotel, built on the
site of a casket factory) just off the Promenade downtown. The theme was “Steppin' Out.”

Joey decided I should go to prom with Ronnie Stier. This was fine except that Ronnie and I both had other plans. I wanted to go with Matt Ashton and Ronnie wanted to ask Tricia Ahaus. Matt and I were writing each other letters faithfully and talking on the phone. We saw each other on school breaks. The closer I got to graduation, the more detached I became from Richmond and everything in it, and that meant the boys there, too. Besides, Ronnie and I were good friends—bonded over the history team—and nothing more.

But Joey thought Ronnie was cute and deserved a try. So he organized a Get Ronnie to Ask Jennifer to Prom Campaign. This consisted of Joey writing Ronnie notes every day in AP History class, hinting about prom and me. When he wasn't doing this, he worked on Cathy Brawley, Eric Ruger's girlfriend, trying to get her to help him. Brawley thought all girls were whores because they were threats to her relationship, especially girls who were friends with Eric, like I was. So Joey made sure to tell her things like, “Jennifer was just saying what a cute couple you and Ruger make and how she hopes you get married one day,” because he knew how much Cathy would like hearing it. He also worked on Teresa, who was good friends with Ronnie. And on me. At night, he would talk about it on the phone to me, trying to convince me to send Ronnie a note myself—something provocative that would get his attention and make me stand out in his mind.