Several weeks later my parents decided they would attempt a reconciliation. The plan was to meet at Peppino’s, our favorite Italian restaurant. It was close to the house, so if all went well Daddy would maybe possibly come back home with us. At least that was what I hoped.
It didn’t pan out that way. My parents met in the parking lot and put their names in for a table. While they waited outside they smoked their brains out and began to argue. It became so fierce that my father sped off in his big blue truck and my mother and I followed after him in the Taurus. We passed each other on the road and my parents slowed down just enough to flick each other off. Repeatedly.
“Fuck you, Eleanor!” my father shouted out his window.
“Ma, please, I don’t want to crash!” I yelled, clicking my seat belt into place.
“Go fuck yourself, Johnny!” she screamed, and we accelerated ahead of him. When my father gave up his pursuit and headed toward the coast we continued home at a saner speed. When we got back to Peacock Street I ran upstairs and locked myself in my closet, where my only company was the crickets chirping away in the attic we never used for storage, thanks to my second bedroom across the hall.
The calls started about forty-five minutes after we got home; my mother screened them in her bedroom, and even though three closed doors separated me from the answering machine I could still hear my father’s cursing and yelling. I wandered into her room and found her sitting on the edge of the bed, her head bowed in resignation.
“I just don’t know what to do,” she said. “He’s gone middle-age crazy. Instead of buying a Porsche he bought a bottle of scotch.” From that night on I slept in my mother’s bed because I didn’t want to be alone. Even though he was acting like a madman, my father’s absence made me feel incredibly insecure.
My mother spent hours on the phone strategizing with Rita about how to fix her marriage—or not. (Though Arline was closer in age, she and my mother didn’t speak anymore, and hadn’t in years, though she wouldn’t tell me why.) Rita would send my mother bubble envelopes stuffed with Valium, and this relaxed her somewhat. Money was tight, but they hadn’t officially declared bankruptcy yet, so we were able to finance our lives with plastic for a while longer. But the clock was ticking—both carpet businesses weren’t exactly reaping whirlwind profits now that its CEOs were engaged in a puerile battle royal, one that made me look like an adult in comparison.
One evening in early September my mother got a call from my father. “This is it!” she announced, grabbing her keys and purse and heading for the car.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“It’s over,” she declared. “Your father has agreed to go to rehab.”
“You mean you made up?” I asked excitedly. “He’s coming home?”
“Well, we’ve agreed that he’ll go to a treatment facility for a month, and then he can come home. He wants us to come and pack his apartment up with him.” She paused by the garage door. “You ready?” she asked, ushering me into the car. We pulled up to my father’s apartment and he was waiting outside. He embraced us both.
“I’m so sorry,” he said to each of us.
“It’s okay, Daddy,” I said, relieved to see him back to his old self. He’d been so angry before; if being away from us for another month meant he would return to being Bruce Springboard, it was a sacrifice I was willing to make. We went into his apartment and packed up his clothes and other personal effects. The furniture was all used or borrowed, and we had so much already that there was no need to take it. I spotted the shelf near the sink that held his liquor bottles and made a beeline for them, twisting off the caps and gleefully pouring the contents of each down the sink. Whatever was in those bottles had threatened to break up my parents’ marriage, and I couldn’t wait to watch it circle the drain. “I never saw someone so happy pouring scotch down the sink,” my mother said years later, recalling that night.
My father checked himself in to a detox center for twenty-eight days, and after he returned he seemed heartened; he reached his sixty-day sobriety mark, then ninety. Oddly, in the years that followed he was still able to have a glass of wine with dinner and the occasional scotch, though not right away. But with his mind now clear he faced our financial difficulties head-on and decided we needed to make some changes. Eight months after we’d moved into the darkened domicile on Peacock Street, my father made an announcement at the breakfast table one morning.
“Kids,” he said, “we’re moving.”
CHAPTER 5
Yolanda Street
Aliso Viejo, California
September 1992
• • •
AFTER A SHORT STINT IN A CONDO IN MISSION VIEJO WE FOUND an airy two-story, four-bedroom abode with lots of light on the edge of Laguna Hills. You had to walk through the living room to get to the kitchen and family room, which was an odd setup, and the backyard was big enough for a chair, maybe two. But I had two back-to-back bedrooms that overlooked the street: One was for sleeping and the other was my study, which my parents outfitted with an elegant bleached-wood writing table and white twin Ikea bookcases. My parents’ bedroom had a stall shower and a bathtub, plus a walk-in closet, and my father finally had a proper office, where we also kept the computer. The only drawback was that the house looked like every other house on the block. It was so similar, in fact, that one day my father pulled in to the driveway, got the mail, and bounded up the front steps, and only when he tried to put his key in the door did he realize he was at the wrong house.
But soon this perfect little cookie-cutter became host to the wars my mother and I conducted, our screams echoing throughout the house and enraging my father. Once I was grounded for ten days because I’d borrowed my mother’s clothes without asking, then had the nerve to act like I didn’t give a shit when she demanded to know what I’d done with them.
“I don’t know, did you try the hamper?” I asked nonchalantly while barely looking up from my game of Tetris, which was doing a fabulous job of distracting me from writing a term paper.
“What did you say, you little bitch?” she yelled back. My father heard this and intervened.
“Whoa! What the fuck are you yelling from room to room for?” he demanded, emerging from the living room and suddenly agitated. (Yelling from room to room was his biggest pet peeve.) Then he was forced, as always in such scenes, to take the side that would end the fight quickest—usually my mother’s.
“Just tell your mother what the fuck you did with her—what was it, El?”
“My DKNY shirt!” she exclaimed.
“Oh! Jenny! Give her shirt back!” he yelled. I said I didn’t know where it was, and he commanded me to find it. I rolled my eyes and acted like I didn’t care again, and he lunged toward me menacingly, coming upon me so quickly that it seemed like he’d covered twenty feet in a matter of seconds.
Once a scene like this ended with a slap so hard I temporarily lost the hearing in my right ear. My father had cornered me on the upstairs landing and backed me all the way into my study with his yelling; I tripped over my own feet in an effort to avoid him and ended up on the floor, where he nearly climbed on top of me to deliver the blunt smack. It was such a violent scene that my mother, the one who’d instigated the fight, had to physically pull him off me. When he got angry like that, which was happening more and more, it was impossible to calm him down. The look on his face when he hit me haunted me for years after that night, and I recognized it from my childhood: He had lost himself to rage, just drowned in the stuff, and went to a place where even I, his little girl, couldn’t reach him.
My mother opted not to send me to a Catholic high school, instead enrolling me in the local public school and shoving me headfirst through the honors program, whether I liked it or not. But I didn’t know anyone there, and for the first couple of months of my freshman year I wandered around in a solitary haze, eating my lunches alone and burying my head in my books. But I eventually made friends, as kids always do, and my little gang
and I would spend afternoons strolling the baking sidewalks that lined the antiseptically pink mini-malls, as none of us was yet old enough to drive. Sometimes we lucked out and one of our moms chauffeured us from place to place. In fact, I’ll never forget one particular car ride, when my friend’s mother was listening to a call-in radio show that featured a woman justifying her marriage to an ex-convict.
“I love my husband,” the caller said. “It doesn’t matter what he’s done.”
“I would never marry someone who’s been in jail,” my friend’s mother said disdainfully, shaking her head. Though she didn’t look at me, I wondered, did she know? She had met my parents—could she tell just by looking at my father that he had been imprisoned? It was a dim realization, but that day in the car was when it began to grow. For the first time, I understood that this very topic applied to me.
My mother was married to an ex-convict.
But hints of my father’s past were suddenly popping up everywhere, and my parents fought less and less to hide them. It was around this time my father got word that one of his New York friends, Vinny Cassese—also known as “Big Vinny” because of his considerable girth—had died of lymphoma. Though I wasn’t sure how they’d met, I knew they’d been friends for many years. I never saw him cry over it like my mother had with David, but he did spend an awful lot of time on the phone afterward with Big Vinny’s son, Carmine, who was in prison and seeking advice from the next best father figure about whether to testify against the gangsters he used to work for. I’d hear my father on the phone night after night, urging Carmine, “Take the deal. Listen to me, I know what I’m talking about.” Over dinner one night he told my mother that the very people Carmine was protecting had been captured on tape ordering his murder. “Can you believe it?” my father asked over his flank steak, so desperate he was even searching my face for wisdom. “They were gonna whack him and he still won’t cut a deal and testify.”
“I thought being a rat was bad, Daddy,” I pointed out. I’d learned that much from the Corleone family.
“Yeah, but being stupid is worse,” he concluded.
AS HIGH SCHOOL wore on my father would often come home in a good mood, boasting of a job he’d booked that had saved us from financial demise at the last moment. But I sensed the desperation fueling his disposition, and since I had a feeling our situation was tenuous I took a special interest, inquiring from time to time about our finances. “We’re okay,” he’d reply, in a rehash of the “How was your day, Daddy?” / “Tiring” routine we’d first honed when I was a child. I thought that if I could see it coming before he did I could head off our financial downfall. But every month before the rent was due he’d come home with relief written all over his face, having swooped in and saved us with a last-minute installation or carpet sale, and a teenager’s vigilant inquiries didn’t change any of that. Perhaps I was clairvoyant, able to spot the tractor-trailer of disaster heading toward us down the road. Or maybe I just knew my parents too well.
During dinner one summer evening my parents broached the subject of a new car. At first it was all hypothetical fantasizing on my mother’s part, but the dishes weren’t even cleared when we were out the door and on our way to the Toyota dealership just off the 5 freeway. Our interest in a brand-new maroon Toyota Camry intensified with every hour we stayed on the lot getting sweet-talked by a slick dealer named Dennis. Soon my parents were submitting to credit checks and filling out paperwork against the backdrop of the setting sun.
“Nothing came up under your Social Security number, John,” Dennis informed my father. “I guess you cleaned up your shit.”
My father nodded and chuckled—Dennis didn’t know the half of it. The down payment was $2,500, with lease payments topping $400 a month. Add in the insurance on the Camry, my father’s work truck, and the Taurus, which we weren’t selling, plus registration on all three—at $450 per car—and my parents found themselves making a hefty financial commitment. It was one they immediately regretted.
“That just ate up our winter savings,” my father said bitterly as we drove our new car home. His business routinely slowed in the winter, even though the temperature rarely dipped lower than 50 degrees. “Now we have no cushion.”
“But Daddy, look at the CD player!” I said. “The Taurus didn’t even have a cassette deck.” When we got home we popped a bottle of champagne to celebrate. Later that evening I found my father in the garage, bent over the hood of the Camry and shaking his head.
“I should return it,” he said without looking at me.
“No, Daddy, no!” I said, not wanting to part with this shiny new toy, one that I’d probably be taking my driver’s test in. My mother came up behind him and patted him on the back. He looked up at her and nodded. I found out later that my mother had been pestering him for several weeks about getting a new car, and she only brought it up in front of me because she knew she’d finally have the majority she needed to win him over.
Almost as soon as I could drive I began ditching school with a vengeance, sometimes joined by my senior friends who only had a few classes a day. We’d hang out in one of their garages and watch movies and eat snacks purchased with my father’s gas cards. When I did deign to attend class I put my head down and slept at my desk. I completely missed out on an entire epoch of literature and history this way, and to this day I’m not even sure exactly what I missed because, well, I was asleep. All told, I accrued thirty-nine absences my junior year. No one called my mother to tell her because I forged her name on my all readmit slips—after a legitimate absence I’d traced her signature onto fifty pieces of notebook paper so I could use it whenever I wanted. But it finally caught up with me and I was assigned Saturday school more than once. My father found out, because there was little that went on that he wasn’t aware of, but he promised to keep my secret. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell your mother,” he vowed. “Besides, any trouble you could get into is nothing compared to the things I did when I was your age.”
Most of my truancies weren’t even planned: I’d drag myself out of bed and start out for school, but think better of it and veer south to the beach communities. I spent a great deal of time surveying the hills above Laguna Beach, where the magisterial manses had been charred by fire a few months before. One cul-de-sac after another featured row upon row of brick chimneys, the only physical reminder that the lots had been occupied by houses. It awed me to think that these instruments of fire were all that remained of multimillion-dollar homes. I took most of these trips alone, absorbed in my meandering against the backdrop of early-nineties complaint rock. I don’t remember these drives prompting any introspection or catharsis; I was just finding a scenic way to kill time. I packed on the pounds driving and eating my way through my hometown, and even though my mother carefully packed lunches for me every day I threw them out and got fast food instead. Eventually I branched out into cinema, taking in independent films in darkened art house theaters across the county—I must have seen Muriel’s Wedding six times in a single month. Sometimes I drove to each of the houses we’d lived in and parked on the street, wallowing in the nostalgia of my fading childhood, especially our first bittersweet months in California after being reunited with my father. As it turned out, the timing of my fancy-free sojourns—of which my parents had no clue—was prophetic. It was as if I could already sense our lives in California slipping away amid the sunshine and the eucalyptus.
“JEN? COME ’ERE for a second?”
It was late afternoon in April ’94 and my father was calling me into the living room, where he and my mother had been talking. I hadn’t been to school that day, so I bowed my head and prepared myself for the guillotine.
“Jen, your mother and I have been talking,” he said. “You know the business hasn’t been doing well lately, and someone wants to buy it.”
My head popped up. “What? What’s happening?” I asked.
“Your father’s going to sell the business,” my mother interjected. Her mouth was p
ulled into her signature pout.
“El, please,” my father said, and made a gesture like a chopping motion. “Let me talk!”
“Fine,” she said, sitting back on the couch and folding her legs. I hated when he tried to shut her up. I felt so embarrassed for her.
“Jenny, I gave your mother the same choice I’m giving you,” he said, sitting forward and talking animatedly with his hands.
“What’s that?” I asked with a nervous smile.
“New York or Florida,” he said.
“We’re moving?” I asked. He nodded.
I looked at my mother. “What did you say?”
“What do you think I said?” my mother asked. “I can’t stand Florida.”
I knew I could count on her. “Dad, I don’t want to leave California,” I said. “There must be another way.”
“Jenny, we’ve been taking out cash advances to pay the rent,” my father admitted. “Every month. And we got more and more behind, and—”
“We busted out the cards again,” my mother said, finishing his sentence for him.
What? But they hadn’t even given me a chance to buy anything this time. “Jenny, we never should have bought that car,” my father said candidly. “The down payment ate up all of our savings—that was our winter money.” Why was $2,500 all we had in the world? How had it come to this? “My friend Ron might be coming by today to buy the business,” he continued. My father’s “business” was a box of extraordinarily detailed index cards with a client history, address, and phone number.
Never Tell Our Business to Strangers Page 6