Fiction Ruined My Family

by Jeanne Darst

  “You’re Patty Hearst and we’re the SLA.”

  “What?” I said. I wasn’t even a brunette. Who was casting this kidnapping?

  Katharine and Julia went and stood next to Eleanor in a police-barricade formation.

  “We’re the SLA. Now get on your feet.” It could be hours before Mom and Dad got home.

  I scrambled to my feet and tried to ram my head through them to get out of my parents’ bedroom but they pushed me to the floor and kneed my face into the carpet.

  “Who’s got the rope?” Eleanor yelled.

  Julia held one over her head. “Affirmativo!”

  Eleanor grabbed the rope and as I wriggled and squirmed Eleanor and her two goons managed to hog-tie me and then blindfold me with a scarf of Mom’s. Next they got me on their shoulders and began carrying me down the front stairs and into the kitchen where Guinness became part of the procession, barking and jumping up at my stomach. After nearly dropping me several times they finally headed back up the front stairs and opened a linen closet and threw me in. Guinness leapt into the closet with me and that’s when the SLA shut the door. Guinness proceeded to scratch my legs and arms and bark wildly. I yelled and yelled but it was no use. I wasn’t sure whether I would be getting out in a few minutes or when my parents got home. I heard laughter and talking above the barking but no specifics of my fate. The darkness of the closet was really riling Guinness up. I don’t know how long I was in there with that terrier but at some point I heard the front door slam and I prayed it was my drunken parents.

  “Goils?” I heard my dad call up the stairs. Guinness began barking like crazy again.

  My father opened the closet door and untied me. My mother came up the stairs.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Is that my scarf? Girls?” My captors emerged from their rooms.

  Eleanor and Katharine explained the game.

  My father said, “Are you still our Patty?”

  I gave him a look of death.

  “You haven’t turned into Tania yet?”

  “No, Dad,” I said, rubbing my red thighs, which were burning with white, raised claw marks.

  My dad patted his jacket pocket looking for his glasses to inspect my wounds. He was always looking for his glasses the way drinkers are forever trying to remember where they set their drink down.

  “We’ll look at those scratches in the morning. Good night, goils,” he said.

  So, from oldest to youngest we had: a book-hater, a compulsive reader, a paperwork fanatic and an idiot detective.

  MOM’S NEW BRONXVILLE PERSONA was about normalcy. She was embarking on a brand-new personal adventure of dullness. Watch me as I transform into the biggest suburban dud mom you’ve ever seen. Being a normal mom involved one pottery class in White Plains, and later one single aerobics class at the school gym. I’m happy to say she never donned leg warmers or a bodysuit. Her jogging career spanned two separate jogs with me around the neighborhood with frequent cig breaks. That was it for her involvement in public life. No clubs, classes, exercise, lunches. No PTA commitments or Junior League or friends. My mother hung out in the kitchen all day long. No one bugging her too much, her days spent at the long butcher-block table, smoking, doing the New York Times crossword, making herself iced teas and little cold steak sandwiches with ketchup, occasionally driving down to the Bronxville Police Department, which had built a brand-new doggy jail because Guinness kept getting out of our house and terrorizing people and eventually mauling an old woman’s toy poodle to death. After springing Guinness she might watch a little tennis on the small TV, but otherwise she’d flip through cookbooks, make grocery lists, feed Oiseau. She’d talk to whatever visitors came through, her kids, their friends, sign a report card or two. The only thing Mom read was the newspaper, period. She conceived of meals and went to the grocery store and cooked. This was the new Mom.

  Her repertoire, Northern Italian and French mixed with midwestern basics, might have been called Mussolini in Missouri or Mid-Ouest Boozer. She made classic midwestern stuff like lamb with mint jelly, German potato salad, ham steak with applesauce, the world’s greatest fried chicken. From our time living in Amagansett she’d picked up more rustic coastal summer dishes like mussels in white wine and garlic, fried trout with cucumber-dill sauce, duck à l’orange, broiled tomatoes (bread crumbs, olive oil and garlic on top, usually served with steak), and things she threw on a fire like roasted onions cooked and served in tinfoil with tons of butter and salt (so simple, and I don’t know anyone else who makes onions like this). A regular weeknight dinner might be coq au vin, veal marsala or chicken cacciatore. She liked a challenge, making things like, on occasion, pot-au-feu, which she pronounced pot-uh-fooooo. People who say there’s nothing worse than “a little knowledge” have never experienced my mother’s “a little French.” She mispronounced everything: un was ume, un peu was ume pooo, bon appétit was bone appetitaaah. Over-the-top incorrect, but she was convinced her accent was “divine.” She and my father went through a homemade-pasta phase in the early ’80s, using a chrome pasta maker that attached to the butcher-block table. My dad made the pasta: shaping a pile of flour on the table and cracking an egg into it and pushing the dough through the machine rollers to flatten it and then guiding the eggy mass through the chrome teeth while they drank wine, blared The Marriage of Figaro, and Mom made her spaghetti sauce with beef and vegetables. She made incredible spinach cannelloni with Dad’s flat lasagna-like noodles. She made a salad where she cooked up some bacon, saved the grease and mixed it with red wine vinegar and sugar and whisked it together and drizzled it on romaine lettuce with the bacon. It was insanely good. She made her own mayonnaise with herbs like tarragon and basil that made her chicken salad sandwiches fantastic. She didn’t overvalue cleanliness in her kitchen; Guinness frequently jumped up, twisted his neck sideways and licked the side of the butter while my mother worked away. I wouldn’t be surprised if we ate more than a few cigarette ashes in our lifetime. Butter and salt were practically rubbed on her own children before she’d give us a kiss hello. But the way she made anything was simply tastier than anyone else. I’ve never had buttered toast as good as hers.

  DAD NOW WORE A SUIT to work every day, but I never got the feeling he was “new Dad” to go along with our new house, new dog, new town. He was definitely old dad. I never got the sense that he saw taking the train in every morning as anything other than another experience, like research. He didn’t seem like anyone else’s dad, in it, the grind, the rat race, for the long haul. His mind was always on the thing he’d rather be doing, writing. On weekends he took notes and worked on ideas and followed hunches.

  “Who’s up for a drive?” Considering the amount of carbon monoxide involved in going anywhere farther than town in our car, no one was ever up for a drive in our family. Eyes, mouths all contorted into polite interest mode. “I thought we’d head out to Sands Point and check out the real Gatsby mansion.” The idea flopped big-time: No one wanted to go look at some dumb house and get a school-like lecture. But somebody had to go with the guy; you can’t just let a man head off alone looking for a fictional town called East Egg, so I said I would go.

  It started to rain the minute the car got on the Hutchinson River Parkway. A little radio might have been nice but Dad didn’t allow anything but low jazz underneath his conversation, so I just stared ahead at the highway.

  “This is gonna be terrific, Jean-Joe, I’m glad you came along. What the hell is wrong with those girls? They’re gonna be bedridden with regret when they find out what they missed out on. So what are you reading?”

  “Ummm. From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.”

  “Don’t know it. Now, when do they read The Great Gatsby in school these days?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, I’ll try and find out. I hope to hell they don’t waste a lot of time on Salinger.”

  We got to the house in a little over an hour. We parked the car on the side of the road. It was n
ow a total downpour. I didn’t have a rain jacket. We got out of the car and walked a bit. Dad had on his gray felt fedora, which he plunked on my head. “Now, this house here,” he said, as we stood in front of a gatehouse and a large gate with tall hedges on either side, “used to be the home of a Mrs. Belmont, a suffragette. Later bought by Hearst but he left it to go run his papers in the West and be with Marion Davies. Absolute monstrosity, torn down in 1940. It’s possible Fitzgerald was here, but this isn’t the Gatsby house.”

  “It’s torn down?” I asked. He had said nothing of going to see a house that wasn’t in fact there anymore.

  He started walking down the street. I followed.

  I pushed the big hat back on my head and wiped the rain from my face. We crossed the road and walked back toward the death mobile. I wiped my eyes again, waiting for something to happen.

  “Most people think it was the Swope house not too far from here, but Fitzgerald was never at that house, he visited a different house of theirs. I’m going to hit the Great Neck library next weekend, have a look at the Great Neck newspapers. I have got a few hunches about some people Fitzgerald based his characters on.

  I nodded. I was freezing and hungry.

  “All right. Let’s head home, shall we, Jean-Joe?”

  This new life Mom envisioned, the one she paid for, the Westchester us, normal and fancy, didn’t last long. When the CBS job ended Dad began talking about not another job but another novel.

  THE CHICKEN SALAD FINANCIAL INDEX

  WITH THE JOB at CBS over, Dad was fleshing out the idea for a second novel, called Black Ink, inspired by his time at CBS, about the owner of a TV network.

  “It’s done in a Waugh style. The network (like CBS) likes to hire celebrities, and the narrator is there to represent Catholics—he’s written for a Catholic publication, very liberal—and is advised that working for the hawkish network will be just like that but that it might be a little more difficult typing with blood on his hands, otherwise okay. His name is Francis F. X. Xavier, descendant on both sides of the numbertwo man in the founding of the Jesuits, Francis Xavier, for whom many, many Catholics are named.”

  My mother preferred his flesh out on Fifty-second Street. This was not the direction she wanted to be going in.

  I now went to school all the time with no lunch money. I would ask my dad for a dollar and sometimes he’d go to his dresser and take change off of it and sometimes he would just say he didn’t have it. You’ll be fine, he seemed to say, opening the front door for me. Go read, go listen, go ask questions about what you’re learning. Lunch will come. Lunch isn’t why you go to school.

  What I was taught about money from my father was that scraping through life builds character, that driving around in our fume-spewing 1971 Ford Torino wagon while other people had new BMWs with red bows on the front in their driveways on Christmas morning made us more interesting than other people, and of course, that money destroys creativity. And last, the very solid: Money doesn’t make you happy.

  After hustling up some lunch for myself at school, an apple here, a muffin someone didn’t want there, I’d come home ravenous and find my mother in her office, the butcher-block kitchen table. “Never spend your capital, baby” was one afternoon’s money lesson from her. At the kitchen table you would also hear gems such as: “It’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor man.” And then there was her signature, “Money doesn’t make you unhappy, you know.” This was the extent of the financial workings of the world as far as I knew. I was never taught how to balance a checkbook or how credit cards worked. (All I knew was that my mom’s worked, my father’s didn’t.) We had a conversation once about economics and we were talking about other parts of the country.

  “What about Maine?” she said, puffing on her cigarette. “Now, that’s poverty. A chicken salad sandwich there is only about three dollars!”

  I call this my mother’s Chicken Salad Financial Index.

  WE DIDN’T HAVE health insurance. We knew not to break anything, not to swallow anything other than food, not to fall off anything or trip, not to let anything bite us unless it was our dog. The hot water was shut off all the time. I washed my hair on the third floor in Eleanor’s claw-footed tub, which I could lean over and only my head would suffer the freezing water, and then my hair froze on the way to school because there was no heat in our car and it was twenty degrees outside so I had these popsicle locks. I could see my breath in my room in the winter. When things broke, like the shower in the front bathroom on the second floor, we just stopped using them. When our back steps rotted through, someone deemed the front door the only entrance worth using. The Torino wagon was now so rusted through that you could see the road from a hole in the backseat floor, there was a grease spot on the upholstery on the driver’s side where my dad’s head would touch it, and the gray fume puffs that came out of the tailpipe just needed some dialogue in them to be highly toxic cartoons. The Death Mobile, we called it.

  MOM HOCKED THINGS from time to time. I remember later on in high school she passed my boyfriend the green beans almondine at our dinner table and asked, “Now, Martin, dear, do you know anyone who might want to buy a pair of antique revolvers? Darling little guns, they were Daddy’s.” I guess she figured if he was hanging around the high school at twentytwo looking for a girlfriend he might be the kind of person who might also know where to sell some guns.

  Mom was seriously on Dad’s case at this point. We needed food, clothes, ballroom-dance lessons. When something came up, my mother would raid the attic even though none of her things would fit any of us. The things in the trunks and boxes were seemingly from another culture entirely, like the mink stoles of Nonnie’s with the heads still on. The idea that women wore small animal heads around their shoulders to indicate status and superiority over non–animal-head-wearing women, women who couldn’t afford those little beady-eyed heads, was fascinating and nuts to me. The teeny bejeweled cat’s-eyes glasses with double thick lenses that Mom wore from about the age of six on were so small that the four of us could never wear them even if we happened to go blind. The white gloves were for the smallest hands imaginable, the hands of a toddler it seemed to us. None of us standard human-sized girls could wear these things that Mom once wore to cotillions and balls. Not the velvet-covered black riding hats—not the teeny beige chaps, not the teeny-tiny riding blazers.

  In those days it was weird if your father was around all day; this was before flex-time and perma-lancers and job-sharing. You either had a job or you didn’t. I remember filling out forms for the Girl Scouts and coming upon “Father’s occupation: _____.”

  “What should I say Dad does?” I called out to my mother.

  “Freelance writer,” she’d yell and then mumble something under her breath. It was always a moment-by-moment call, what my father did. If he and my mother were getting along, he was a writer. If they were fighting, my mom might yell, “Absolutely nothing,” to my question. Being a writer was like being a baby in an Edward Albee play. Some days your writing existed, some days it didn’t, depending on how much people had had to drink, if you had been flirting with some professor down at Sarah Lawrence, if the car had died again and there was no money to fix it.

  I remember being mortified when walking with some kids after school and seeing my dad coming out of the pretty red brick house that was the Bronxville library. Other people’s fathers spent the day with people, not microfiche.

  “Freelance writer.” Surely my parents made this term up to define the hanging around my father did most days? Friends’ parents seemed confused when I’d say “freelance writer,” and I’d think, Drop it. Just drop it.

  “Who does he write for?”

  “Himself,” I would say.

  “Oh, really! Anything I might have read?”

  “Umm . . . not his novel, that wasn’t published . . . do you read Harper’s magazine? . . . or Commonweal? It’s a small Catholic magazine, very well regarded . . . he’s in The Nor
ton Reader, too . . . what’s The Norton Reader? It’s um, an anthology . . .” It was a real pain in the ass having a writer for a dad in a town that wasn’t a haven for struggling artists or struggling anything. I heard Don DeLillo lived in Bronxville but I never saw his ass.

  The people who did understand what freelance writer meant were my English teachers, a lot of whom were female, single, struggling writers who lived on the Upper West Side. To them, my dad was a gentleman artiste, someone maybe luckier than they as he didn’t have to teach, someone who was living it, baby. Dad was asked by my tenth-grade English teacher to come and teach a writing class. He came in a suit, of course—my dad wears a suit, and often a hat, to the coffeemaker. He read the story in the Bible, John 11:35, where a bereft Jesus goes to his friend Lazarus’s tomb and demands the stone from his tomb be removed and orders Lazarus out. My father read the shortest phrase in the Bible from that story. “Jesus wept,” my father said, as his audience grew groggy.

  “Don’t ya just love that? Beautiful. It can’t be improved upon. If you can get your writing down to just what’s essential and then knock off five more words, you’ve got it. ‘Jesus wept.’ Now, raise your hand if you’ve read any Joyce at all and I mean even just opened it up and took a shot at it when you were feeling brave.”

  No hands were raised.

  “Nothing to be embarrassed about, believe me. When the time’s right you’ll know. Now, the thing about Joyce . . .” The simplicity lesson my father was teaching then moved into Joyce and The Dubliners, T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” Proust, and a few English poets. I couldn’t really follow it and it seemed like other students were equally perplexed. Unlike at home, though, my father was cut off abruptly after forty minutes by a loud bell that sent children flying past him like preppy pigeons muttering niceties. “Thanks for coming to our class, Mr. Darst.” “Thanks for the writing lesson, have a nice weekend.”