You're Not Pretty Enough (4 page)

Another time after I put Cody to bed, the phone rang, and I picked it up to hear my mom on the other end.

“Look out the front window.”

I pulled the phone with me and peered out. The Cooks lived at the top of a fairly long driveway, and at the bottom I could see a figure
wobbling around on all fours.

“Is that
Leslie?”
I asked.

“Yep,” my mom said. “That’s Leslie, the all-terrain vehicle.”

“Wow. Should we help her?”

“No.” Then she followed up with a phrase that is probably
the first time I remember irony staring me straight in the face: “She hates to be embarrassed.”

We watched her make the slow crawl up the driveway, together on the phone. Every so often she’d stop and put the jacket she was holding on
the ground and lay down.

“Is she taking a
nap
?” I asked.

“Looks that way.”

“I’ll make the coffee,” I said.

I was making a lot of coffee in those days—and not
just for the Cooks.

My parents divorced when I was seven. Divorce is disorienting, especially for kids. Suddenly we went from one house to two and from two parents to four as both my mom and dad remarried. My dad was climbing
up the corporate ladder and soon had a nice new house where we had great clothes and toys, but we had to keep them there. My mom wasn’t making a lot of money in those days, and so we didn’t have those things at her house and had to
go on food stamps for a while. It was confusing at times.

As a kid, I attended a Unitarian church with my family. When my parents separated, they must have arranged who would go as a means to avoid
each other because I don’t remember seeing them there at the same time again. One day in the children’s class, when I was around six, I was asked to light a candle and burned my finger in the process. Later, we all congregated in the main communal area where the church served refreshments. I sat sulking in a
corner while the other children played, with my finger wrapped in a cold, wet cloth and elevated on the table. A man approached me. He had slightly long, curly brown hair and wore a funky shirt with a navy blue corduroy blazer and
jeans. He asked what happened, but I didn’t say anything, so he kneeled down to my level.

“I have a daughter,” he said. “She kind of looks like you.” He nodded toward my hand and smiled at me. “Can I take a look?”

I gave him my hand. “What’s her name?” I asked.

“Jules,” he said and unwrapped the cloth. “You know what helps?” I shook my head no. “If you wet it and blow on it.” I watched as he dabbed my finger on the wet cloth and told me to do just that. He was right.

“Hello?” my mom said as she knelt down beside us and grabbed my knee. “I’m Jenny’s mom, Cathy. I haven’t seen you here before.” She wore her hair long in those days and was dressed in a flouncy skirt and a light blue
knit sweater with no bra. He noticed.

“I’m a new member,” he replied and smiled. They started to chat and then slowly stood up. “Keep blowing on that finger, Jenny,” he said, and I watched them talk and flirt while I kicked my stocking legs under the
chair. They married a couple years later.

We lived in a neighborhood that was poor and was made up of summer cottages—situated around a lake—that were converted into
permanent residences. As I grew older, I grew more embarrassed about where we lived. From far away, it was beatific and peaceful, but when I became a teenager, I became hyperaware of how appearances from all aspects of one’s life translate into “who you are” and how people view you. In junior high, I’d hear
people talking either directly or indirectly about my neighborhood, and despite the status it achieved by housing a couple of popular kids, I was left with the clear impression that my community was the proverbial other side of the tracks.
And this was in a town where the tracks were pretty modest to begin with.

My mom calls this my “Prom Queen of the Appalachia” look (though
I was not Prom Queen). Note our house’s serious need for a paint job and the chicken coop in the back.

When I viewed my neighborhood through that lens, several descriptors came to mind: run-down, deadbeat, poor. This was not how I wanted
people to see me, so I distanced myself from the tiny houses where the paint and the siding were stripping away; I distanced myself from the lawns littered with debris and cars or trucks and the people who proudly sported mullets and
openly drank alcohol while walking the loop around the lake in naturally faded jeans.

Still, we had woods and that private lake and a beach, and we fished and swam and played outside for as long as the weather would let us.
We also had a big garden and tons of animals—chickens, dogs, cats—lots and lots of cats, which brought with them an army of fleas. My sister and I loved the cats. We hated the fleas (
really? So surprising!)
. At the time
we shared a room, and when we’d enter it, we’d watch as they’d land on our legs in a rush.

But there was a bigger parasite in the house, and that was my stepfather Richard. He saw the flea situation not so much as a nuisance or
even a health hazard; he viewed it more as a learning opportunity. And that’s because he was an entomologist, so he looked for any opportunity to teach my sister and me about insects. The fleas especially loved white socks, and when we’d wear them, they would cling to us faster, in more volume, and stay longer. My stepfather would give us glasses of soapy water, which killed them immediately. We’d sit on the floor, pluck them off, and watch them float to the bottom and drown.

There were other teachings about insects. Randomly, he’d
launch drills that required my sister and me to go outside and collect bugs. We’d pin them on corkboards, and he’d help us identify them by the unique tapestry of their shells and wings. We sort of liked that. We did
not
like
his other attempts to gain our interest on the topic, though, including cooking larvae, crickets, and other insects
for us to snack on,
saying that Americans are in the cultural minority by not including insects in their food
pyramid
.

“Um, yeah, no thanks,” I’d say. “I used my food stamp allowance to buy this bag of Yodels, so I’m all set.”

When we first met Richard, he was cool, open, playful—more
of a friend. After he and my mom married, he was home with my sister and me a lot after school. My mom worked full time (often overtime) at a hotel down the street. Richard worked only sporadically as a beekeeper inspector, testing Northern Ohio hives for Foul Brood disease. He was incredibly smart—early
on in his career he discovered a beetle. He became the preeminent scholar and professor on said beetle, which led to numerous articles in prestigious beetle-related publications. So, it wasn’t like he couldn’t
get
work,
it’s just that he would only work when he was sober, which wasn’t often. He rested, intoxicated, on his beetle-related laurels.

This mix of smarts, oddness, and drunkenness created the perfect storm of creativity when doling out punishments.
For instance,
we used to keep cat food in the oven to prevent all our cats from scratching open the bags. I used the oven a lot to heat up snacks after school for my sister and me, and almost always, I forgot the cat food was in there. Soon the
smell of burnt Meow Mix would waft throughout the house. Yelling didn’t work, nor did sending me to my room. What worked was one day Richard saying to me that if I was so fond of wasting cat food then perhaps I should just eat it.
You know, kill two birds with one stone.

“Eat the cat food?” I asked.

“That’s what I said.”

“How am I supposed do that?”

He went to the cupboard and pulled out a bowl and then a
spoon and set it on the table in front of me. He then grabbed the burnt cat food from out of the oven and poured it into the bowl and then took some milk out of the fridge and poured it on top of the cat food. “That’s how.” He leaned
against the kitchen counter, crossed his arms, and watched. This made me feel like I was in the midst of a battle of the wits (and I wanted to win). I’m a rebel from way back. It’s literally in my blood.

My great-grandfather, William, second from right, with his cousins Emmett and Bob Dalton from the infamous Dalton Gang. The Dalton Gang was a gang of brothers who operated as bank and train robbers/outlaws from
1890–1892. They were also related to the Younger brothers who rode with Jesse James.

So I did what any nine-year-old rebel would do: I ate the cat food, which had the texture and shape of Lucky Charms cereal and tasted
like burnt, salty toast. “Mmmmm,” I said, looking at my stepfather. “This is the best meal I ever had!” Richard stormed out of the room and slammed his bedroom door. I took the bowl of cat food and threw it away in the woods.

At night, Richard would goad my Mom into partying. One night I remember them playing “Another One Bites the Dust”
by Queen over and over until I yelled, “Can you please keep it down?
SOME
of us have to get up in the morning!” Then they’d giggle and go into their bedroom, where
they’d drink some more and eventually fight and slam doors. Richard was a mean drunk. Critical. And so bitter about his own
divorce that my mom often pointed out to him, “You know you hate your ex-wife more than you love me?”

When I officially became a teenager, my mom got a job as an account manager at an advertising agency in Cleveland. She had ten dollars in her checking account. Richard wasn’t contributing much financially, but she
immediately took us off the food stamp program as a symbolic measure and stopped drinking as a literal one. She felt she was at a crossroads and decided to take the more serious path. Richard wasn’t pleased to lose his drinking
buddy and frequently left the house at night.

Soon after I entered eighth grade, I became BOY CRAZY. So when the boy I had
the most massive crush on
asked if I would be at the football game that Friday I said “Yes!” louder than necessary. I was obligated
to babysit for our next-door neighbors, the Cooks—as I did almost every Friday night—but procrastinated in telling them.

A massive snowstorm hit the area the same week, which was not unusual from October through April in northeast Ohio. What was also not
unusual was the “life must go on” sentiment of my people when it came to the weather. This meant that the high school football game would go on as scheduled, and this also meant that the Cooks would be looking forward to
slinging back Jack Daniels by 5:30 p.m. at the bar down the street.

By Friday after school, I knew the clock had run out. I needed to get permission to go to the game, but in doing so I would reveal I
was shirking my responsibilities with the Cooks. My mom was still at work, so I had to clear it with Richard.
Dammit!
I told him that I wanted go to the game more than anything and, anticipating his protest, threw in a “and I need to experience life for once!” statement. I could see the wheels turning in his
mind.

“Sure,” he said. “Go right on over and let them know.”

“Really?”
It was that easy?

“Yep. Go right on over. Just go over in your bare feet.”

Ah…there it is.
“But there’s snow on the ground.”

“So?”

“So, I’ll catch a cold!”

“Well, you wanted to experience life for once.”

For reasons I still don’t understand, I determined it was whacked but inarguable logic and set out immediately before he changed his mind. The snow crunched when I stepped into it and went up to my mid-calf, so I ran in quick steps to ward off the cold and numbness. I knocked on my
neighbor’s door, and Mr. Cook opened it.

“I have to go to the football game because Mike just broke up with Kim and she is really upset, but she doesn’t want to tell her parents,
and so she really needs to be out of the house, and I am the only person she will talk to, and Richard said I could go as long as I came over in my bare feet and told you and you didn’t care!”