One day, I convinced myself that if I scribbled nonsensically on my assignment, Mrs. Poppet would remove her permanent frown long enough to become concerned with my uncharacteristic gibberish, and she’d gently pull me over to the side to say, “Honey, is everything okay?”
Of course, that was not at all what happened. Instead, I got reprimanded for not following the rules and for “ruining a perfectly nice ditto.” I was given a second chance at the assignment. Sure that if I scribbled on it yet again Mrs. Poppet would get the hint, I tried the same trick a second time. This time, she became thoroughly exasperated, and so I was taken out of my class altogether and permanently placed in another one, where a different teacher could be saddled with my rebellious ways. So much for manipulation tactics. I forgot about my sadness and my need for attention when, on the first day in my new class, we made homemade butter and then promptly consumed it on crunchy French bread. It seemed I had struck gold. Two points for manipulation tactics.
I recently recounted this story to my mother, since, even in its retelling now, it seems to be missing a piece. What teacher would simply switch a seven-year-old student to another class for acting out in this relatively benign way? “I remember you switched classes,” Mom responded, when I brought it up to her, “but I don’t remember anything about scribbling on the report. The class change was, as I recall, due to a personality conflict between you and your teacher.”
Which begs the question: Why did anyone, least of all my mother, think it was normal for a teacher to have a “personality conflict” with a second grader? Changing classrooms changed my entire life in drastic ways, and yet the adults just didn’t seem to notice that I might be perplexed and even infuriated. So I did what kids everywhere do when their lives turn upside down: I sucked it up and mindlessly swallowed the new normal. With that, and just as mindlessly, I swallowed the bites of bread and butter that my new teacher, Mrs. Jones, foisted upon me with a smile and a wink. That wink seemed to say, “This will make it better.” And, like magic, it did.
There were a few other wrinkles that needed smoothing over as well. My mother and father were in a constant court battle for child support (Dad was consistently late with payments, sometimes not paying altogether), and neither of them shielded my brother and me from their explanations of exactly why he or she was right, and why the other was a despicable human being who was unworthy of our devotion. Alternate weekends with my father were tense for me. There was never a comfortable accommodation for us in his house, and my mother and father differed so drastically in terms of parenting techniques that the excessive freedom I was given when I was with him (compared to the limits set by my overprotective mother) was jarring.
During one weekend trip to an amusement park town, Wildwood, my father let me and Jeremy go off by ourselves and told us to meet him back at the hotel later that night. The fact was he was probably going off to get a drink—or, more likely, several. Jeremy, annoyed by his pestering little sister, left me so that he could go ride some big-kid roller coasters. I somehow found my way back to the hotel and to our room, but then stayed up all night literally shaking with fear. I got through the night by closing my eyes tight and imagining my grandmother’s arms wrapped around me.
—
Meanwhile, Mom moved on again. By the time she met Wayne, a quiet and tolerant engineer with a PhD that he never mentioned, who didn’t own one pair of jeans (until my mother took him shopping), “divorce” and “remarriage” were becoming two very common words in my vocabulary.
Dad was also busy expanding my ever-growing roster of parents. He had recently gotten remarried to Muriel, a fiery and smart woman who zealously loved cats. Every present she gave me throughout the few years of their marriage was somehow feline themed—books about kittens, cat stuffed animals, sweatshirts with kitty ear patterns. She even baked cat-shaped sugar cookies, which I ate exuberantly. Muriel often told me she thought I was the cat’s meow.
I guess I thought that having multiple parents was simply part of growing up, as common as Cabbage Patch dolls (mine was named Casey and had red hair to match Grandma’s). The day Jeremy and I waited to meet Wayne, who would become our permanent stepfather, though we didn’t know it yet, we busied ourselves playing Nok Hockey in the finished basement at Pumptown Corners. “I’m nervous,” I told him. I was seven.
Jeremy sneered. “Why? It’s just another one of Mom’s dumb boyfriends.” He then aggressively scored a goal while I was lost in thought—busy contemplating whether I should change into my Strawberry Shortcake dress, by now slightly too small for me but which I had already worn three times that week anyway. I decided against it, instead stopping our game early in order to grab a fistful of buttered popcorn that Jeremy had just microwaved—the perfect salty distraction.
A half hour and second bag of microwaved popcorn later, a tall, handsome-in-a-nerdy-way man, with a beard and mustache that hid his mouth almost completely, descended the basement stairs—and immediately demonstrated his good sense by presenting me with a ceramic clown doll, which to this day sits on my windowsill.
It was decided soon after that Mom and Wayne would get married and we would leave Pumptown Corners for yet another fresh start. I took one last look at my bedroom with the rainbow decal plastered onto the pink wall, and I cried inconsolably. Tears streaming, I rode my bike to Tamika’s house for the final time and told her I’d see her around. We ate cookies in silence and sadness. It was our Last Supper. We decided to memorialize the moment by giving ourselves tiny cuts on our fingers and rubbing the wounds together—“Blood sisters for life,” we whispered—and we agreed to continue to stay up late, even by ourselves, and watch Saturday Night Live.
I left Tamika’s with a stinging cut on my finger and a gnawing sense that the safety of Pumptown would never be replicated anywhere else. When I returned home with a puffy face, I found Mom and Wayne busy rolling white paint all over our beloved sunrise mural that decorated the big wall by the stairs, an image that just a few years prior had been symbolic of our fresh, sunny beginning. I secretly stood at the foot of the stairs and watched as the vibrant orange sun and its bright yellow rays disappeared. The wall was a grayish white now. It didn’t belong to us anymore. Pumptown was slipping away, just as Brock had. The sun was gone and, though I didn’t know it at the time, the chill I felt should have warned me that for whatever reason, my brief fling with feeling “normal” was over, too. I wouldn’t get it back for a long time.
The following week, we moved to Anna Lane, to a yellow house with white shutters, on a freshly paved cul-de-sac, in a different part of Edison, with a different school. On the day we moved in, the four of us sat around a sturdy cardboard box in our new kitchen—we hadn’t yet located the table—and brought in an extra-large double cheese pizza. It had been a long day of moving, and we were all hungry. As I sat dangly legged on a flimsy folding chair, surrounded by a new iteration of my family, I rubbed my thumb over the spot on my pointer finger that I had pricked when Tamika and I became blood sisters just the week before. The spot was completely healed, which saddened me.
I could practically taste the absence of Tamika, and of the rest of my life that I had known so well. Suddenly, I became panic-stricken that I wouldn’t fit in anymore—a fear that wound up coming true, in spades. The safety of Pumptown was gone, I had officially outgrown my beloved Strawberry Shortcake dress, and even though I wasn’t yet eight years old, the newly formed chip on my shoulder made it clear that I was no longer a little kid.
My family all stared at me as I grabbed a third, and then a fourth piece of pizza.
I was, I realized then, absolutely ravenous.
—
It’s amazing how clearly I remember that hot and crunchy pizza from thirty years ago. I see now that food, and the comfort it carried, had been slowly inching its way up in value for me, culminating in that piece of pie—and in the many other bites that began to etch the lines of my days
. Food, up until around that point, had simply been what I ate. It did not yet define me. It did not yet provide me with the close companionship that I desperately craved. It did not yet give me the solace I required after a long day of being the new kid at school. It did not yet provide the relief I needed from gradually coming to feel that I was a circular-shaped peg trying to stuff myself into a tiny square hole. It was not yet my constant distraction, my unconditional source of love, my trusted confidant. Up until our move, food was just food.
That all changed—quickly and furiously—when we drove across town and landed on Anna Lane.
New kid. The very words have the ring of childhood misery. Being one, in the middle of the year in third grade, was not the kind of challenge I was ready for. Cliques had already been formed, the totem pole order of the class established. Looking at the situation from an adult sociological point of view, I suppose that having someone jump into a social group made up of children who are just reaching the age where group dynamics matter and bullying seems like a viable strategy is disorienting, not only for the newcomer, but for the other kids, too, who don’t quite know how to make sense of this new variable that’s suddenly in their way, taking up their space.
I was not the type of kid who could successfully negotiate this new social setting. I had suddenly become painfully shy, a new trait of mine that manifested when we moved. The other kids thought I was “retarded” because my eyes were so heavy lidded and because I didn’t say a word, not to anyone—not even a simple “this is so totally rad” on the much-anticipated “J Day,” when we were learning how to write J in cursive and everybody had to practice by writing Jasmin. I was lonesome, and I longed for my old bedroom with the rainbow decal, the condo with the bright mural on the wall. I ached for familiar comfort.
Thankfully, there was one very obvious place I knew of where I could find that. And so it went that, during a time when I was feeling forlorn and disoriented—years before I deemed it my enemy—food became my new best friend.
The friendship had been forged that first day in the new house with the pizza, when I calmed my stomach and mood with the melty cheese, the thick, crunchy crust, and the feeling of security that can only come from fullness to the point of bursting. In one swift meal, full became my new normal, and I sought it with a fierce fervor. Fullness was reliable, I realized then. I could control it, and each time thereafter that my stomach ached from carrying too much food for one little girl’s body, a sense of security and accomplishment spread to my limbs and heart, tingling and satisfying, blanketing me with a staggering sense of order.
—
Changes at school were simultaneous with big shifts at home, and there were bumpy times there as well. My mother decided that since they were getting married, it made sense for me and Jeremy to start to call Wayne “Dad,” even though, of course, we already had one of those (even if she preferred to believe otherwise). I can now see that in her own way, her proclamation that Wayne was now “Dad” was emblematic that she, too, was desperately grasping for a sense of normalcy. But for me, that didn’t work. I had to live in my world, not hers, and that world already had a “Dad.”
For a while I acquiesced—figuring that Mom knew the rules of having a new family better than most, so calling your stepfather “Dad” surely must be an appropriate gesture. But when Jeremy began to protest Wayne’s new label, I followed his lead, feeling what had become a very familiar sensation regardless of which of my angry and very vocal parents I happened to be with: that I somehow needed to come to the alternate parent’s defense.
“But we already have a dad!” Jeremy yelled—and I echo-shouted, “Yeah! We already have a dad!” with my little arms crossed and my brow furrowed, proving that I meant business. Mom and Wayne just stared back at us blankly, knowing this was a sinking ship with no life preservers for them.
From that day on, we called Wayne “Wayne.” The whole episode left me very uneasy, though, and Wayne became the victim of my angst. Such, I suppose, is the lot of stepparents. Projecting all my problems onto Wayne and acting like a spoiled brat probably started when I sensed Jeremy’s frustration with him—a frustration that, in hindsight, I can see was almost certainly unfounded. So I, too, took out my angst and anger on Wayne, rather than on my parents or my classmates, and proceeded to spend the next decade doing everything I could to make him feel like scum.
I was the worst possible stepdaughter you could imagine. I would mumble choice insults at him just loudly enough for him to hear and just quietly enough for nobody else to. I would steal money from his drawer to buy Hershey’s bars at the drugstore down the street, mimic him behind his back, and—in what I liked to think of as a unique and creative form of acting out—eat dinner with him at the table only if I was surrounded by a fort of cereal boxes, simply so that I could avoid looking at him and watching him eat. When my mother finally put her foot down and told me that I was no longer allowed to shield my spot with the cereal boxes, I covered my left eye, as if my hand were a visor, and stuck my thumb in my ear, because the last thing in the world I wanted was to hear or see Wayne consume food. That’s not to say Wayne was a gross eater; I simply didn’t want to share that space with him and resented that I was being forced to. So, unfortunately for Wayne, I became the rudest and brattiest possible dining companion. Wayne sat on my left, so—even though I’m left-handed—I taught myself how to eat with my right. Anything to keep my dinner a private affair.
My anger at Wayne was unwarranted and unfair—he was, after all, an innocuous guy. More than that, he was good to me—always driving me to my playdates, making sure I had what I needed, and even taking the day off work to join Grandma and watch me in the school spelling bee (he even didn’t seem to mind that I was the very first one out, adding an extra l to deliver). Still, looking back, it doesn’t even remotely surprise me that I was desperately seeking a scapegoat—and an escape. I didn’t know I was being unfair—I only knew how I felt. And it doesn’t surprise me that these feelings reached their apex at the dinner table. For me, the act of eating was deeply intimate and personal—something that remained my own even when nothing else seemed to be—and I had no interest in sharing that activity with someone I had decided to hate. Mealtimes became joyless for my whole family, thanks to me—a time to manage my petulance and frustration.
Yet, through all my acting out, and when practically everyone else felt like my enemy, food replaced Tamika as my best friend for life. It was food and me against the rest of the world, and the rest of the world started with my family.
—
I found solace not only in being a complete bitch to Wayne, but also in something equally bad for my heart: eating cheese. Lots and lots and lots of cheese. We kept a breadbox stashed with crackers in the hallway between the front door and the kitchen—the perfect place for me to grab a box of Cheez-Its or saltines without anyone noticing so I could bring them upstairs to my pink, troll-infested bedroom and consume the entire box in blissful peace while watching Growing Pains or listening to A Chorus Line. If I was really lucky, and my mother was busy placing a phone order with QVC, as was her daily habit, I could sneak into the kitchen and quickly snag the Easy Cheese to create the most delicious, cute little swirl for my perfect cracker square.
As the year went on and I slowly started to recognize that my family’s makeup was indeed atypical—a reality that slapped me across the face when my father and Muriel split up, and I knew I’d never get a worthy cat tchotchke again—I took a step back and tried to honestly assess my family.
I suppose that becoming more objective about your family is some kind of normal developmental step. But for me at the time, that assessment simply revealed the obvious fact that I had an unusual number of parents. Another fact that I had never before noticed suddenly became crystal clear to me: My mother was remarkably beautiful. I began to wonder if I would ever forgive her for it.
—
I had alway
s suspected that she was elegant. But, after the first parent-teacher meeting at my new school, when my fourth-grade teacher mentioned to me how gorgeous my mother was, I realized that my hunch was correct. She was not only ravishing, she had a killer figure, too—and as my teacher’s frequent comments about “what an attractive mother I had” proved, she was a real head-turner. The great lengths she took to get there should have tipped me off.
Mom’s morning routine mystified me. I would often sit on the corner of her bed and watch as she delicately applied her makeup—slightly bronzed cheeks with emphasis to the upper cheekbones; forest green eye shadow with tiny little chestnut brown wings penciled on just above her lash line; rosy lips, precisely lined and filled in like the work of a true artist, which Mom was. She would gently lift and tease her short, stylish auburn hair, and I would silently observe—taking in her precise technique, while mindlessly snacking on a sleeve of saltines as I watched the show unfold before my eyes.
I licked the salty top of a crisp cracker as Mom widened her eyes and applied a dark coat of mascara. I delicately nibbled while Mom just as delicately degunked a corner of her eye. My new grown-up teeth chipped away at the rest of the cracker, going clockwise, while Mom strategically dabbed her grown-up perfume on her pulse points. My cracker was gone, as were Mom’s skin blotches—magic!
I didn’t know whether I should be proud of my gorgeous mother or ashamed that my own looks paled in comparison. And perhaps most confusing to me was how separated Mom seemed to be from her beauty. She was always unhappy with her reflection, always striving for a perfection she couldn’t seem to find. This was especially true when it came to her body, even though to look at her, there was no denying that her figure was what the world considered ideal, the perfect shape to display the most form-fitting fashions.
Always Too Much and Never Enough Page 3