Fiction Ruined My Family

by Jeanne Darst

  I thought my problem was academic, Lazie-onnaire’s disease, Layme Disease, Dumbentia. Because no one ever said anything about my drinking. We drank on weekends but also did a fair amount of drinking during actual school hours at Bronxville High School. We had daytime kegs at nearby Scout Field. When someone put a sock up on a post in the school courtyard in the morning that meant some people were going to the beer distributor in Tuckahoe to get a keg and there would be a party at “the field” around noon. “Sock’s up” somebody would say, looking out the window of Mrs. Ribner’s English class that overlooked the courtyard where the sock hung on a post. Apparently a beer smell coming off me in the middle of the day didn’t seem unusual to teachers or my parents. Grades became everything but they had yet to weigh in on daytime drinking. When Katharine came home one night with twigs in her hair and said she had decided to take a little nap while walking home from a party and toppled into a pricker bush by the side of the road, it became one of the funny stories we told. The only rule we had around drinking was that Dad did not want us drinking before going out at night. Julia and I were having some beers before a party once and he came in and let us know that he didn’t want us drinking before parties. No pre-drinking drinking.

  Smoking wasn’t particularly frowned upon, either. You couldn’t smoke in front of Dad, from his own asthma he seemed to have some idea that children shouldn’t smoke, but Mom didn’t object too much as long as you didn’t smoke her cigarettes. She kept her cartons of cigarettes in a drawer in the kitchen and she was beginning to notice that packs were being opened rather savagely as if by a novice. Julia and I denied smoking her brand and were vindicated when the novices turned out to be rats living in our basement who would come up into the kitchen drawers at night and eat her cigarettes. Her children smoking her stash was bad enough, but rats, they could damn well get their own cigarettes. She promptly called an exterminator.

  My dad made me take Princeton Review, the SAT preparation course, on Saturday mornings. It was expensive, over five hundred dollars, and I went up ten whole points after taking it (not the kind of dramatic improvement they advertised). My father then decided I needed more one-on-one help, since that had worked such wonders with April Dean. He hired a tutor named Mr. Burnham to come on Sunday mornings. The first Sunday he came I forgot he was coming and had been out at some swanky party in the woods near the Metro-North train tracks with my friends. There was a knock on my bedroom door.

  “Jean-Joe, are you decent? Mr. Burnham’s here. Throw some sweatpants on and get downstairs. Posthaste.”

  I made my way downstairs and met Mr. Burnham. Unbeknownst to me, I had a giant hickey on my neck.

  “Jesus, Jean-Joe, it looks like you were attacked by Cujo last night.” My father put some spit on his finger and tried to rub the mysterious red blot with teeth marks off my neck.

  “What in God’s name is that?” my father said before I pushed him away and ran to the toaster to get a look.

  The summer before my senior year in high school I got a break from SAT mania by going to Nantucket to be a mother’s helper for my mother’s friend from college. I had my driver’s test coming up but I was supposed to be in Nantucket on the day of the test and I couldn’t leave the job and come back and take my test for one day, so I came up with the logical solution of getting someone else to take it for me. If I had asked Eleanor or Katharine to take my road test, a felony, they would have thought of their futures, their ability to get jobs, have a clean record. Julia simply said, “Yeah, okay. What time?”

  She did great. She passed. My dad was especially proud, mailing my new license to me with a short note, “Congratulations, Jean-Joe. You passed! Love, Dad.”

  Patty Henley had two boys, Christopher and Simon. They were five and eight. Mrs. Henley had just been left by her husband for a younger woman and she was fairly wrecked over it. Man, these class of ’62 Manhattanville grads could cry at night. She had been spending summers in Nantucket for years, always renting the same house near her friends. This family had three gorgeous daughters, one of whom was an actress on a soap opera. That summer one of them was on crutches, and to me being a beautiful woman on crutches was an unbeatable combination. My sisters and I weren’t allowed to break anything as we had no health insurance. I really envied anyone with a broken arm or leg. So extravagant! Maybe someday. I was friendless on that pink and green isle, so one night I decided to party by myself. Mrs. Henley was having dinner across the street at the Murphys’, and Christopher and Simon were riding their bikes up and down the street. I went through the hall closet and found a big bottle of vodka, something I had never drunk before. I was a beer drinker, usually via funnel. I got drunk and wandered over to the Murphys’ house and entered the living room, where people were sitting around enjoying a glass of wine, and in a blackout I started yelling, “Simon! Christopher! Get your bathing suits on! We’re going to the beach!”

  “Isn’t that your mother’s helper, Patty?” Mrs. Murphy said.

  And then, according to what Mrs. Henley told me the next morning, the two women carried me back to the house and put me to bed. The next day at breakfast when Mrs. Henley asked if I had been drinking, I said, “No, why?”

  Dad could relate to my situation, I guess; in Bronxville he had no one to talk to, either—there were no artists around. (Local newscasters Bill Beutel and Chuck Scarborough lived there, hardly the Algonquin Round Table.) Mom was a phone person, but talking on the phone wasn’t possible for me in Nantucket, there was always someone around. So writing letters became a way to tell my family about my job, my boss, a way to be miserable and have fun at the same time. Dad was the only person in the family who had time to write back, so we became pen pals. He was thrilled. My father thought I should compile all of my letters home and call them Letters from a Mad Mother’s Helper. We signed off our letters with Andrews Sisters lyrics, “I sove you lo much, Dad” and “No bout a doubt it, Jean.” It was probably the first time I saw language, formally put together as opposed to just whizzed around back and forth for comic effect, as a kind of fun. It was also the first time I saw that bad life equals good art. My miserable summer left me with a pile of funny letters home and a connection to what my father did or didn’t do, a connection to him.

  MY SENIOR YEAR in high school all my sisters were away at college. Things got particularly lonely when Julia went to college and I had to deal with Mom every night by myself. Mom’s gloom was nocturnal; it came alive at night, after about seventeen glasses of Dewar’s. When I’d pester her to perk up a little, easy on the drama, s’il vous plaît, she’d remind me, “I was born on Pearl Harbor, baby.” Which wasn’t true. She was born four days after Pearl Harbor, December 11, 1941, but if I brought up that fact she’d say, “Close enough, dearie.” She fell off a horse at thirteen and broke her arm; she fell out her bedroom window at eleven and was in a leg cast for months; she drove her Thunderbird into a ravine, God damn it, she was legally blind; she was teeny, five feet, which isn’t that much fun except when the Randy Newman song “Short People” came out, which she thought was “a riot.” (“Oh, isn’t that a riot?”) But generally things were not a riot to my mother.

  When I would call Katharine at Vassar, I’d tell her about the arguments on the front lawn, or the Sarah Lawrence professor my mother was convinced was Dad’s lover, who mom was calling, screaming, every five minutes. I might as well have been living in a Blarney Stone bar near Grand Central, considering the tenor of the place. One Monday morning Mom had just disappeared.

  “Mom’s MIA. I think she took off to St. Croix to see Corky.” Corky was a friend of my mom’s from Villa Duchesne. “Are you reading?” I’d ask her.

  “No,” she’d snap back, long used to the accusation.

  “It seems like you’re reading,” I said, from the pink Princess telephone in my room, which came from my grandmother’s house in St. Louis. It still had her old exchange phone number on the front, that Hitchcockian combination of words and letters. I loved it,
not because I liked pink or irony, or was sentimental, but because the ringer was broken. I could call out but was never disturbed by incoming calls in my bedroom. The perfect form of communication in my mind, a model for what I fantasized about in a romantic relationship.

  “I’m listening. I’m listening! I heard you. Mom’s MIA in Taos. Where’d she get the money to go to Taos?”

  “She probably hocked something of Nonnie’s. St. Croix. You see you’re not listening!”

  “Taos. St. Croix. What’s the diff? She’ll come back eventually. With four hideous white sweatshirts with toucans on them or something and that’ll be that. I wouldn’t worry too much about it.” Sound of a page turning. A thick turn, maybe a magazine.

  She wanted to help me become, not cool because that she couldn’t help me with, but me. Only less of an asshole. Doesn’t mean she stopped reading while I poured my guts out to her, but she was there for me in some profoundly distracted way.

  Katharine was herself a pragmatic person but unlike Eleanor, she admired risk-takers, she liked ideas and literature and writers, she believed in people. She loved whatever part of them was lovable and ignored the rest of them. This was nothing less than a magic trick to me. How can you ignore such gigantic, in Mom’s case, lapses in judgment, strength, maternal instinct? How can you discard the self-obsession of her ilk? She went to fancy schools and owned horses and had sports cars given to her at sixteen, and we were supposed to feel bad that that was all over and had been replaced by, let’s face it, us. Her sister, our aunt Ruth, was living her life in California and she wasn’t turning to dust every night at five o’clock. People moved on. Didn’t they? From some bullshit idea of what they thought they had coming to them? Somewhere? Somewhere, I was sure, there were people who moved on, people who realized how good they fucking had it and didn’t go over the same stupid crap every night.

  Mom had taken to occasionally sleeping on an orange cot on the lawn and Katharine would come home for a weekend and simply pull up a chair and bring out some iced tea and the New York Times Sunday crossword, and the two of them would spend the day in the sun drinking iced tea and deliberating over a six-letter word for the opposite of a bad design (W-R-I-G-H-T).

  I WAS FURIOUS AT MOM, and yet I also knew I was an alcoholic like her from the first time I drank. I guzzled tons of champagne at Eleanor’s graduation party and before I went to bed I stole another bottle of it and put it in an old dirty tire that was in the way back of the Torino for my next drinking binge. I woke up and hardly remembered anything of the party. I remembered a champagne fountain and strawberries and drinking with Julia and then I remembered stealing the champagne. I dragged myself out of bed and ran to the car to make sure it was still there. I knew this was a little odd. To wake up in the morning and locate my next drink. I knew it wasn’t normal to not remember things when drinking. I knew I was like Mom. This was not good. So how, I thought, how can I get away with it? How can I drink and not turn into Mom? I guess don’t get married, don’t own a chaise longue, don’t smoke (too late), don’t be five feet tall, okay good, I’m already five feet five, don’t be rich and spoiled, check, don’t cry all the time, no problem, don’t dye your hair blond, okay. Most of all don’t drink Dewar’s scotch. Now, that’s easy. Maybe I could do this.

  THE TREASURER’S REPORT

  TO KNOW MY FATHER is to know “The Treasurer’s Report,” a monologue written by Robert Benchley of the Algonquin Round Table. It was written in 1922 for a live revue show and later made into a short film starring Benchley. I don’t remember a time when he wasn’t pushing it on us. Benchley plays an assistant treasurer for a boys’ club who is forced to go on for the absent treasurer at the annual dinner gala and give the financial report of the organization. He’s the world’s biggest bumbler but in a very endearing way, giving this dry, dry report. It is a very funny piece but as outdated as my dad’s wooden shoehorns. It felt like old white guy stuff to us. He had gotten us to love old white guy stuff like the Andrews Sisters and Abbott and Costello and the Marx Brothers, but these could pass for entertainment, whereas the Benchley piece was literature, albeit comic, found in a book (we hadn’t seen the short film) on our living room bookshelves called The Treasurer’s Report and Other Aspects of Community Singing. It was just the kind of writing that Dad would bring up over and over again for us to “try.”

  As a kid I was absolutely terrified of clichés. My father forbade them in our home. It was like the way other people regarded cursing in their house. If you said, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink,” my father would go ballistic. Mom couldn’t control herself, apparently, because she violated this rule about every five seconds.

  I was under the impression clichés could ruin you, ruin your life, your hopes and dreams, bring down your whole operation if you didn’t watch it. They were gateway language, leading straight to a business major, a golfy marriage, needlepoint pillows that said things about your golf game, and a selfinflicted gunshot to the head that your family called a heart attack in your alma mater announcements. Character suicide. Language was important, sexy, fun, alive, extremely personal, it was like food, you wouldn’t just pop anything into your mouth, why would you let anything pop out that hadn’t been considered and prepared for someone to enjoy? To ignore language was akin to ignoring the very person you were speaking to, rude, uncaring, unfeeling, cold. It was a way to connect and also to woo, to charm, to manipulate, it was a tool for love, for survival. Your words were you. To ignore language was to ignore Dad. To love words was to love Dad.

  MY FATHER HAD EXTREMELY strong feelings about what was okay to read and what was not. I was completely intimidated by his literary standards and expectations and to this day it seems amazing and daring to me that other people will just read something without thinking much about it. “Oh, I found that book in my living room. I don’t know where it came from. My babysitter must have left it here.” Your babysitter? You just read whatever’s lying around? Are you crazy? You think you’re gonna make it to fifty living like that? My father asked in every conversation, “So what are you reading these days?” I always knew it was coming, I agonized over whether to lie or not.

  He was like the Great Santini of the Strand. Few people could take him on; he was so well-read and had a memory that could retain every detail of everything he’d ever read, as well as jokes, lyrics, arias, names of store owners he’d met on his honeymoon in Paris, names of restaurants where gangsters were gunned down in 1924. He could quote lines from books he disliked better than you could quote lines from what you claimed was your favorite book of all time. The list of acceptable writers to bring up included: T. S. Eliot, Faulkner, Woody Allen’s humor pieces (and movies), Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Zelda Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Keats, James Joyce, Yeats, Wordsworth, Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, H. L. Mencken, Norman Mailer, Murray Kempton, Edmund Wilson, Ring Lardner, Henry James, Shakespeare, Evelyn Waugh (I remember repeating “E-vlyn, E-vlyn” to myself around the house when I was about fourteen, terrified I’d slip and pronounce it like an American woman’s name), D. H. Lawrence, Dos Passos, Nabokov, Chekhov, Twain and Hemingway, and composers like Leonard Bernstein, Mozart, Cole Porter and Fats Waller. Contemporary writing was only for people who might live forever, otherwise, the point was the greats.

  He was always letting you know, huh, huh, who was in charge. You think you can sit around reading what we read when we read Raymond Carver all summer? You’ve got another thing coming, baby. He wouldn’t let you spend too much time talking about popular writers. If I was really pissed at him I might mention this “amazing!” John Fante novel I was halfway through. If I was getting a kick out of the plays of Christopher Durang, he’d say, “Oh, well, if you’re getting serious about farce, you can’t beat Oscar Wilde. What about the French? Have you tried Feydeau?” Like most people I thought e. e. cummings was delightful, a poet so playful he attracts teenagers and college students, but e. e. cummings was too bloody easy: easy
easy cummings, Frank O’Hara? Too easy. There was always someone better, harder to read that he would divert your attention to: Keats or Shelley, for example.

  “Jean-Joe, have you given that Ring Lardner I gave you a try yet?” Lardner’s book Haircut is a favorite of my father’s.

  “My God, is that funny. Not a false note in it. Give it a try.”

  The writers you were strongly discouraged from wasting your time on: Toni Morrison, anyone in the category of magical realism including Gabriel García Márquez and fantastic realism, Italo Calvino, historical fiction, Don DeLillo (“White Noise was absolute crap . . .”), Capote. Obviously anything inspirational was completely unacceptable, mass market anything, showing up to meet him for lunch with a John Grisham book under your arm would have been like showing up with no pants on, you know, get yourself together, for God’s sake. Not even discussed, it would be so ludicrous.

  If I could have calmed down a little I might have been a reader, but I was not a great, devoted or thorough reader. I loved family drama like Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, adored comic greats like Molière, Wilde, the essays of Woody Allen. I always wanted to be well-read, but I wasn’t anywhere near well-read. Decently read, fantastically fakably read, motherfucking-lying-my-ass-off-to-your-face read. But it seemed like there was something more fun than books, like actual fun.

  MY DAD HAD SPENT many years writing at five in the morning before he would go to work as a reporter at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, years when he had four babies under five years old, a mailman-mauling dog named Wordsworth, and our pony, Pepsi, in the backyard, whose manure he would shovel before heading out to work. But now he wasn’t getting up at five a.m. to write and he wasn’t heading off to a job. He seemed to be losing something essential to being a writer. Or already had. Maybe it was getting older. Maybe it was Mom’s drinking, which wasn’t what you’d call ladylike, maybe it was his own drinking, maybe he lost his confidence after his second novel didn’t sell. Dad wasn’t writing anymore. Not that anyone talked about this while it was daylight outside. Now that he wasn’t writing, it seemed like he talked about writing and books constantly, as if the fantasy was growing, had to grow if the reality was shrinking.