“Why should you be alive?” my dad asked him. “You’re not working and my daughter’s dead.”
The judge remembered my dad and let him go.
My dad’s sister Anna told all this to my mom, who at some point shared it with me. I don’t know if I learned this story before or after seeing my parents’ headstones, but the two stories juxtaposed together make sense, writing-wise. Still, I call my mom, ask if she remembers when she told me about my dad losing his burial plot.
“I don’t,” she says, “but did I ever tell you: when I went with your dad to his father’s funeral—this was a couple years before you were born—the funeral director told me about your dad losing his cemetery plot. The director said, ‘In all the years I’ve worked here, I’ve never heard of anything like it—denying a man burial next to his daughter.’ Your dad’s ex-wife eventually did offer him the plot—this was when you were a little girl—but your dad refused it. He said, ‘I have a family here.’”
MOM
It was my parents’ twelfth wedding anniversary. I was ten. A snowstorm swept through Sandusky. We had plans to celebrate at home that night. We were in our car leaving the grocery parking lot when my mom abruptly told him to stop the car.
She left it, slammed her door, and opened mine.
“We’re walking home,” she told me.
My dad looked back at me.
“Come on,” she said. “I’m teaching you a lesson.”
“What did I do?” I asked.
“I’m teaching you you don’t need a man.”
I told her there was a snowstorm. It was too cold to walk home. Our house felt far away.
“Stay with him if you want,” she said and began to leave us.
I apologized to my dad and ran after her.
My dad slowly followed in the car with the front passenger window down.
“It’s a blizzard,” he said.
She ignored him.
I asked her why she was angry, and she ignored me.
He pleaded for us to get in the car. Home was at least two miles away.
She yelled at him to leave us alone. He looked at me, and I looked down at my boots. When I looked up, our car was disappearing into the falling snow.
“What if he dies in a car accident?” I asked.
“He’ll be fine.”
“But there’s ice.”
“He won’t die.”
I watched my breath chill before me and disappear.
We walked in silence along the shoulder of Milan Road. When I looked behind us, snow had already covered our tracks. Snow plows rumbled by. A few cars came and went. A man offered us a ride and my mom waved him off.
“We’re almost home,” she lied.
The man drove away.
“Your father doesn’t trust me,” she said.
The friendly man who worked in checkout at the grocery store, my dad thought was too friendly, she explained.
My dad often told us to wait in the car while he checked out. I always thought he was being a gentleman, bringing the groceries to us.
“Your father doesn’t trust anyone,” she said.
“What about me?”
“You’re different.”
•
When we reached our house, he was at the kitchen table, his head in his hands.
“Dad,” I said.
I yanked off my boots and ran to him.
My mom walked past us and into the basement. He followed her, and I went into the bathroom and lifted the door to the laundry chute. I heard my dad apologize.
That evening at dinner, they smiled at one another and held hands.
•
“Sometimes he drove me nuts with his possessiveness,” my mom says when I ask about the snowstorm. “His father was the same way, apparently. Your dad’s mother would go to the grocery store, and your dad’s father would time her. Your dad thought it was horrible, but then he went and did the same sort of thing to me.” She pauses. “After you left for college, your dad and I were on the back porch—and he asked if I regretted our marriage. ‘Of course not,’ I told him. ‘Why would you ask me that?’ He said he knew how unreasonable he’d been. He said he was sorry. He said he was afraid of losing me. Your dad would have been happy, just the three of us, in a cabin out in the woods. He said you and I were all he needed.”
FOUR
I open a cardboard box packed with my journals and medical records. The journals contain a mess of fragments and diagrams and outlines. On one page is a circle of arrows, and inside the circle is a handwritten sentence in tiny script: “I can’t write.” Strips of paper are glued or stapled to some pages. On each strip is a typed sentence from past writing projects.
One strip reads: “A strip of Italian widows.” A blue arrow points to some notes in the right margin: “strip of paper/strip of street” and “East Boalt/I bolted East.” After my dad died, only Italian widows lived on East Boalt Street. On that same page, I drew my childhood home and wrote “Metaphor” on all the windows. I cut an opening where the front door would be. Behind the door, stapled on the next page, is a letter, which I photocopied, from my dad to my mom:
Sweetheart,
Would you believe I asked our daughter if she would make me an Easter card for you, because I didn’t feel well enough to go out to buy you one. Her reply was “Don’t worry Dad. I’ll make one for you.” So that was why we were very secretive when you walked in the room and I was spelling her the word WIFE. She sure is something for just a little 6 yr. old. She’s more like 16 yrs. PS: I think we should have Jeannie make all our holiday and birthday cards and the money can be put away for her education.
Your Ever Loving Husband
The only part visible through the door: “Don’t worry Dad.”
Some of my sentences are crossed out, but I don’t know why: “We lived a few blocks away from the railroad tracks. At night, train whistles lulled me to sleep.” On the next page, I sketched our staircase and wrote memories climbing across and up its steps. Underneath the staircase I wrote “I can’t sleep I can’t sleep I can’t sleep.”
How can I capture mania on the page and still make sense?
And forget the medical records. I lied to my doctors so many times I can’t trust those.
MENTAL ILLNESS
I remember standing on the top of our stairway when I was eleven, or maybe twelve, and hearing an unfamiliar voice. It said Jeannie, or maybe Jeanne. My mind filled with loud, hurried thoughts, and just as suddenly emptied, like a flock of birds scattering from a field. I looked at my portraits framed on the wall, the chronology of my childhood. The farther down I looked, the younger I became.
I called out for my mom. She appeared at the bottom of the steps, holding a rag.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
I asked if she had called my name, and she said no. She was cleaning the kitchen floor.
“Where’s Dad?”
He was in the garage, building a birdhouse, she said.
“What’s wrong?” she repeated.
Had the voice called for me, or for my dead half sister?
“Nothing,” I answered.
MOM
I call my mom just to chat, and she mentions she’s reading a book about feng shui.
“Our house breaks almost every rule,” she says. “Your main door isn’t supposed to open in front of your staircase. This book says it creates huge amounts of negative energy. If the door and staircase are too close, like ours are, then you need a feng shui consultant.”
My mom decorated the staircase every Christmas. She’d wrap gold garland around the handrail and each baluster. She’d put stuffed reindeer and Santas between some of the balusters. I’d run down the steps on Christmas morning, and Gigi would follow. We’d give Gigi wrapped bones and watch her chew and paw through the paper while we took turns opening our presents around the big artificial tree. When I was in junior high, I opened the power-tool box, the same one I’d wrapped my dad’s plaque in, and in
side were twenty books I’d wanted, mostly novels that I’d seen older students reading for class: Catch-22, Great Expectations, To Kill a Mockingbird.
DAD
That same Christmas, I gave my dad an iced tea maker, and he returned it and gave me back the money.
“Save this,” he said. “You don’t need to buy me anything. Just make or write me something.”
JEANNE
“You can be anything you want to be,” my dad said to me often.
Every month he led me into a small white room in the back of our bank where he’d show me colorful bonds in a safe-deposit box. Jeanne’s medal was also in that box, in a white box of its own.
“This money is for your college someday,” he’d remind me.
And inside the white box was what I tried to be.
•
Not once did my parents pressure me to be perfect, as I believed Jeanne had been. Still, I tried to be. I had to be.
While my friends played kickball during recess, I sat on the convent steps with the most unpopular girl—a kind, gangly brunette who walked through the halls with her head down and always sat next to the teacher during Thursday morning mass.
“She’s fun,” I told my friends.
Actually, she spent most of our time together thanking me for not ignoring her, like the other girls. She once asked how it was I could smile as much as I did.
“I don’t know,” I lied, thinking of Jeanne.
“Your father said she was always smiling,” my mom had told me.
I worried my kindness was disingenuous. I confessed it to a priest. The priest told me not to be so hard on myself.
“Skip the rosary this time,” he said.
I didn’t understand.
“Skip it,” he said.
MENTAL ILLNESS
In pursuit of perfection, I made a list. Kindness mattered first. Secondly, intellect.
If I scored less than 100 percent on a test, I’d hide in a bathroom stall, crying. In junior high, I started scratching my wrists. At night, on my bed, I cut the soles of my feet with scissors. I told no one. I asked my teachers how I could improve as a student.
They arranged a conference with my parents.
But my scratches and cuts remained a secret.
“They told us we needed to stop being so hard on you,” my mom says. “We told them, ‘We’re not doing it. She’s doing it to herself.’ We didn’t understand it.”
My behavior confused even me. There were vast fields of time that I forgot about Jeanne, or maybe I simply became lost in those fields.
•
Finally, beauty.
“You could wear a potato sack for a dress,” my dad told me, “and still look beautiful.”
Sometimes I glanced at my reflection in a store window or car mirror, but by fifth grade I avoided seeing myself as much as I could.
Yet the photographs of me that my dad kept in his wallet showed a pretty child: olive complexion, thick wavy dark hair, big dark eyes, thin.
“You’re the most beautiful girl in the world,” he often said. “Inside and out.”
During Thursday morning mass, I compared the size of my thighs with those of the girl next to me. I wanted to be an altar girl yet worried how I’d look in the white robe.
My friends seemed as obsessed with their appearance as I was with mine. Before every gym class, the girls took turns weighing themselves in the locker room.
“How much do you weigh?” one girl asked me.
“I don’t know,” I lied.
The school nurse weighed me every week in her office. My teachers were concerned. My parents were concerned.
“I have a good metabolism,” I told my parents, as I pushed my food around my plate.
When I did eat, it was only in front of them.
The girls in my grade played two games relentlessly: Miss America and Is She Pretty? In the first game, they reenacted on our playground Miss America competitions. The second game they played at sleepovers. One girl would leave the room while the others evaluated her appearance, beginning with her hair and working their way down to her legs. Then they voted.
DAD
Once, in fifth grade, I tried to leave the house in a skirt that hit a few inches above my knees.
“You can’t wear that,” my mom said.
I brushed past her into the kitchen where my dad was drinking coffee.
My dad looked at my skirt, then at me, then back at my skirt.
“I’ll change,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’ll change.”
JEANNE
One night my best friend and I sat on my bedroom floor with a Ouija board between us. The nuns at school called the planchette “the devil’s tool,” but almost every girl in my sixth-grade class owned a Ouija board. (“For Chrissake,” my mom said after I told her what the nuns called it, “you can buy it at Toys ‘R’ Us. Come on, let’s go get one.”)
I confided to my friend that I wanted to talk to Jeanne.
“My half sister,” I explained. “She was sixteen when she died.”
“What do you want to ask her?”
“What did she want to be when she grew up?”
We touched our fingers to the planchette.
“Jeanne Vanasco,” I said. “Jeanne Vanasco. Jeanne Vanasco.”
I asked my friend to say Jeanne’s name with me, and the planchette began to move: “I-A-M-J-E-A-N-N-I-E.”
I let go.
“Why would you do that?” I said.
“What’s wrong?”
“She doesn’t have an i in her name.”
“Oh,” my friend said, and laughed.
DAD
“Do you want to go for a drive?” my dad asked me.
“Where?” I said.
“How about you and me feed the birds downtown?”
“Sure,” I said.
We brought our dog, Gigi. Had my mom been home, she would have come, helped us shred up stale bread for the seagulls (if only we’d known it choked them), but she was shelving books at the library.
Naively I believed she now worked because she wanted to work. In reality, she’d taken the job because in fifth grade I joined the girls’ basketball team. My parents could budget for my glasses, my braces, my regular checkups, but not a broken limb. I’d have done something low-risk, like chess club, had I known why she accepted the job.
My dad drove, and cars honked and passed us. Their drivers rolled down their windows and cursed.
“Dad, I think you need to drive faster.”
“I drove plenty fast in New York. They can go around me if they’re in such a hurry.”
We drove by the courthouse, the carousel museum, and the sculpture of a boy in overalls, holding his leaking right boot in the center of a big fountain. The fountain fascinated my dad, the same way cows and country roads fascinated him.
Our car circled the library a few times, slowing when we passed the entrance.
I remembered my mom’s words in the snowstorm: “Your father doesn’t trust me.”
“The library building is nice, isn’t it?” he said.
As we circled the library for what felt like the tenth time, I asked if he wanted to go inside.
“No,” he told me. “Let’s go feed the birds.”
•
My dad took a computer class at the library, partly, probably, to be near my mom, and partly because he wanted to learn.
My parents had just bought me a computer. Neither knew how to use it. My mom preferred not to touch it.
“I’ll mess it up,” she said.
But my dad enrolled in a free class. While he practiced on a computer upstairs, in the media room where my mom sometimes shelved movie tapes, I read downstairs, near the glass floor.
After his first class ended, my dad told me that when the teacher said, “Move your mouse to the top of your screen,” my dad lifted his mouse in the air and moved it around.
“No, no, Terry,” the teacher told him. “You keep it on the mouse pad.”
MOM
“After I started working,” my mom tells me, “he was lonely. Me at work, you at school. He got so he only wanted to spend time with you and me. He didn’t want to go anywhere without us. Well, you know how possessive he was. He was so jealous when I started working. He’d drive around the library, making sure I was there. You remember.”
“I do.”
“I get it—his first wife ran around on him, and it hurt his confidence. But I’d keep telling him, ‘Terry, I love you. You’re it for me. You’re the one.’ I wanted to be with him, but he and I agreed that I should work for the insurance. I know it was hard for him. He came from the generation where the man provided. But you started playing basketball. What if you broke your arm? We didn’t want to tell you that you couldn’t do something because of insurance. We’d been paying for your dentist and doctors out of pocket before that. If you remember, we took you to the dentist every six months. Your father and me never had that when we were kids. We wanted the best for you. Everything was for you, and that’s how we wanted it. You didn’t have the best of things. We didn’t take vacations. But we were happy. I’d never been so happy in my life.”
“Did I ever get mad at him?” I ask her. “Lose my temper?”
“With your dad?” she says. “No. With me, yes. I was the one who had to tell you no. He couldn’t tell you no. If you wanted to sleep over at your friend’s house and he didn’t approve of that friend’s parents, he’d tell me, ‘You have to tell her she can’t. Have her friend stay the night here.’ Why do you think all those sleepovers with your friends were at our house? That’s because he didn’t trust people. He and I would get into such fights about that. He was so afraid of something happening to you. I told him, ‘She’s got to live in the world at some point. We’re not always going to be around to protect her.’ One time he became absolutely irrational about something related to you going out. You were a kid. He told me that if I didn’t tell you no, he was leaving. I said, ‘You know where the suitcases are.’ You didn’t see these arguments. You didn’t know how strict he was.”
The Glass Eye Page 3