I reached into my pocket for another caramel cream and unwrapped it, fumbling with the twisted plastic ends. The cellophane crackled so loudly, I couldn’t hear the rest of what she said. Suddenly, I was starving—so hungry I couldn’t get the candy into my mouth fast enough. The sound of my chewing was all that filled my head. Calm coursed through me.
I chewed each of my remaining caramels, one by one, until all that was left was a pile of shiny plastic wrappers on the seat beside me.
That day at the hospital was a turning point. Over the next few months, Mom stopped commenting on Dad’s drinking. I no longer heard her plead with him to “take a night off” when the two of them were in the kitchen alone. She didn’t stop him as he picked up the key ring and headed for the door after he realized the only drinks in the fridge were milk and Coke. She tells me now that she just didn’t want to fight anymore. She tried to see if she could just put up with it, so that Anthony and I still had an intact family.
And so he drank.
The handful of nights when Mom didn’t have a night shift, she cooked dinner, and we ate together. She’d make the most delicious meal, one of my favorites being meatloaf covered in a smoky-sweet glaze and served with potatoes she’d mashed with garlic, butter, and heavy cream. Those nights were the only ones when I didn’t have to chew so loudly I couldn’t hear what was going on around me. The plates, the napkins, the silverware—they all sat peacefully in place. We became more comfortable in our seats around the square butcher-block table. And lots of times we laughed as we ate meals as big as the whole of our four personalities. I’d feel, at least momentarily, that all was getting better. Dad would be his charming, brilliant self. He’d tell us stories that would make me laugh so hard milk went up my nose midgulp. Anthony’s stutter would be less apparent. Each word, every sentence required less forethought when Dad didn’t yell. It felt as if Dad had placed his foot on the one wobbly leg of our table, making it steady for once. And I’d begin to think that maybe we were becoming normal.
But there were times, perhaps midmeal, when something would rattle him—a sentence, a sound, anything at all—and almost instantly, Dad was done eating. It was as if he’d grown sick and tired of holding that table still, and he resented us for even asking him to keep his foot in place. Suddenly I’d feel my place setting shift slightly. I’d grab hold of my plate, sure that I could stop the sliding if I held tightly and acted as though the wobble didn’t worry me. I’d work to keep the food on my plate sectioned securely. The peas had to maintain a strict border with the mashed potatoes, which couldn’t dare touch the meatloaf. My buttered biscuit was quarantined. Having each food perfectly within in its own boundary made me feel calm. I’d take a bite from the potatoes and make sure to smooth them carefully back into place. I’d eat peas in rows so as not to disturb the line that stood between them and the meatloaf. And if the boundaries I had created on my plate broke—if those peas and potatoes mingled—I worked quickly to put them back into place.
The last meal I can remember eating together around the same table—all four of us—was in the early spring of 1994, the year I turned nine, just before Dad entered rehab and Mom told me we were moving. Dad’s parents, Nana and Papa, decided to move permanently to the condo they owned in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, rather than straddling the sunny South in winter and Medfield, Massachusetts, where they owned a house, in summer. Mom said that Nana and Papa eventually were going to give us their house and that, for now, we’d rent it from them. I didn’t understand fully why we’d leave our home to live in a town fifty miles away. Anthony had just begun high school and pleaded for us to stay. My best friend, Lilly, told me to run away instead. But when I overheard Mom on the phone with her sister Maureen, I heard words like “foreclosure” and sounds of crying as she talked about not having enough money.
All eight of Mom’s brothers and sisters drove up from Boston to Methuen that summer to help us move everything we owned to Nana and Papa’s house in Medfield. I cried alone in my room. I found Mom crying, too, in our basement, just after everyone had left and we were readying ourselves for a final exit. I saw the way she bent over as she cried in the dark corner of the laundry room, trying to hide from Anthony and me so that we wouldn’t know how much it killed her to leave. How badly she wanted to save our home for us, and how heavily failure weighed on her shoulders, and her heart, when she realized she couldn’t. I watched her cry for ten minutes without letting her know I was there.
When school started that fall, I wanted nothing to do with it. I feared being not only the new kid but the fat one, too. The bell had already rung as I walked into Mrs. Harrington’s fourth-grade classroom and made my way to the lone empty desk. I felt my cheeks flush as heads turned. I smiled at every person I passed with my mouth closed, since in first grade, kids had told me that the gap in my teeth and the chubbiness of my cheeks made me look like a chipmunk when I smiled wide. Half of me wished I hadn’t come in late that first day so that I could have avoided such a pronounced entrance, while the other half wished I hadn’t come at all. Seeing the way the other nine-year-olds looked at me made my pants feel tighter, made the waistband dig deeper into my belly. Everyone had moved on to wearing jeans, and I was still in stretch pants. Stirrups, no less. I wore gold earrings when other girls had those cool stick-on holograms of stars and moons. I was out of place.
But a few months into the school year, I’d hit a kind of stride in Medfield. I learned that if I made fun of myself for being fat, then the other kids couldn’t do it first. I learned that being funny, especially with the boys, made it much less likely they’d call me things like “wide load” and “lardbutt.” I learned that certain jerseys in gym class were bigger than others and that I should always get to the pile of them first if I wanted mine to fit. I learned that even though the belts we wore while playing capture the flag never wrapped fully around my waist, they’d stay put if I tucked each end into my shorts. I learned that sometimes even your friends call you “whale” behind your back, but it doesn’t mean they don’t like you. I learned that it was easier to tell people that Dad was away on business rather than at home, drunk, and in his underwear. I learned that if I got invited to friends’ houses after school, I’d probably be asked to stay for dinner, and that would mean not eating alone at home while Mom worked.
Just as soon as I began to adjust to our new life, I woke up to find Dad hadn’t come home the previous night. Mom told me that he’d entered rehab. I sat at the kitchen table that morning, confused at the suddenness of his leaving. I came to learn, three days later from listening in on all Mom’s phone calls, that the night he didn’t come home, Dad had driven up the interstate while swigging from a gallon-size jug of vodka and had crashed into the guardrail on the right side of the road. He was en route to our old home in Methuen, where he had intended to park his car in the garage, close the door, and drink with the engine running until carbon monoxide filled the air enough to kill him. He hoped he wouldn’t come back from that drive home. The day I pieced all of this together, I stayed home from school and ate five bowls of cereal in a row. I kept my eyes focused on the cereal box, the milk, and my bowl until all that was in the cabinet was gone. I ate until I felt so full, I couldn’t move. Until I couldn’t think of anything but the churning of my stomach as it digested Lucky Charms and Frosted Flakes and Trix.
The court took away his license. For two months the state held him in a rehabilitation facility three towns away from where we lived. When we visited him on weekends, he gave me art projects that he’d made during his free time—a painted ceramic Christmas ornament and a notebook of black-and-white sketches. He had us in stitches as he told stories about the various people he’d met in group therapy, using unique voices and gestures to mimic each. And when he finally came back to us, he seemed a stable man. He rode his bicycle around Medfield. He got a paper route. He helped me with my homework, and we played video games for hours on end—while Mom found a third and fourth job, trying desperatel
y to make ends meet. From the way she seemed panic stricken all the time, I should have known that things weren’t going well. I should have known that something was wrong when I tagged along with her on our weekly Sunday grocery shopping trips, and she told me our budget was twenty-five dollars. But somehow I still felt blindsided by the news that we had to leave our new home. Nana and Papa had lost patience with Dad, with our missing rent for a few months, and two weeks before Christmas 1994, they told Mom we had to leave their house by the first of January. There was no negotiating, no convincing them, even when Mom pleaded with Nana, “But, Kay …, we’ve got nowhere to go. Please.” We packed all our belongings in trash bags and liquor store boxes and moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Wilkins Glen, Medfield’s low-income housing, by the start of 1995. The second of January, unbeknownst to us, my grandparents changed the locks and trashed all our remaining possessions there.
Three weeks later, just after my tenth birthday, Mom signed me up for a bowling league. All my new friends had joined. Thursday afternoons after bowling, the bus dropped us off in front of the school, and I’d look out the frosted window to see the usual caravan of Caravans. Parents lined up to greet us. With a quick scan, I knew which parent belonged to which kid—and that in the whole crowd, no one was searching for me.
Most weeks I’d catch a ride from someone, saving me from a two-mile walk home. One of the parents would be kind enough to shuttle me, even though I lived farther away than they’d like. No one ever said it, but I sensed the silent sigh in the “Sure!” I noticed the brief flinch as we bounced over the speed bumps leading into my apartment complex. They’d smile into the rearview mirror as they remarked, “How nice they keep the grounds around here!” I’d smile back, feeling momentarily lucky that the low-income housing we moved into at least looked respectable.
One particular Thursday, I hopped off the last step of the bus and saw Dad there. He’d stopped drinking and had taken to riding his bike again. I noticed how cold the air was that hit me. The temperature bent as low as New England weather knew to limbo. He was wearing a puffy down jacket, so loud in color that I could practically hear it shout “I’m royal BLUE!!” Snug on his head was a ski cap that some company must have been giving out as promotional swag at a conference years ago, when he held a job. It was obnoxious in its green, tan, and mustard glory. Brown, deconstructed. A pom-pom made of cheap yarn flailed from its top.
I gasped at the sight of him. Worse than his clothing was the old mountain bike. I was certain that it had rotted for years in someone’s garage before it finally hit the lawn of a yard sale.
“What are you doing here?” I said.
He smiled. He must have assumed that as a kid who rarely had a parent to pick her up, I would be thrilled. Instead, I was aghast. If horrified had a “Which emotion am I?” poster in a psychologist’s office, it was my face.
He had come to pick me up. To ride along beside me as I walked home from school. I waved to my friends and their parents, letting them know I didn’t need a ride, and began the walk. He followed, keeping up with my chubby-legged superstride. I asked him to “Please, please, please, please, take off your hat.”
“Wha—no! Why? It’s cold out.”
“It’s so ugly and I hate it and … you’re embarrassing me.”
I paused and then said, “I want you to go away.”
“Andrea, c’mon. That’s crazy talk.” He offered a sheepish smile, continuing to pedal.
Adamant now, I stopped. He braked as I turned to face him. “I don’t want anyone to see me with you. I don’t want you to ride beside me.”
And with that, his eyes changed. I could see I’d wounded him. His mouth hung slightly open, as if he had one last plea in him, but, oh, never mind.
I walked away from him, heading right as he steered slowly left. I didn’t turn around. I felt so sure of myself in that moment, so positive that I was making a necessary decision. I believed that avoiding embarrassment, all the dreamed-up humiliation in my head, was worth pushing away a dad who came to pick me up from school.
An hour later I’d made it home and was unable to acknowledge the shame, the guilt, of what had happened earlier.
I lingered in the doorway of the kitchen, spilling a cereal supper, and looked at him, seated at the dining room table. He looked back at me and I could see that he’d had a drink when he had gotten home. His eyes looked cloudy and glazed. I wondered if what I’d done had made him veer his bicycle up North Street to the liquor store.
He turned back to the table, and I looked down at my floating Apple Jacks—milk logged and bloated. “I’m sorry,” I mouthed, so quietly that no one could hear.
I thought briefly to sit with him, but I walked to the den instead, face downturned to my bowl, tears salting the peach-hued milk.
For months he continued to drink in the same reckless way he always had. Then spring came, and he went missing.
Two full days passed before the phone rang and Mom rushed to the kitchen to answer it, while I ran to the one in the living room to catch it, somehow both of us knowing it would be him.
“Mere,” he began, his voice unsteady.
She stretched the coiled phone cord from the kitchen wall all the way down the hallway and leaned into the living room where I was. With her hand over the receiver, she told me to hang up. Her eyes warned me against protesting. I placed the cordless phone back in its base, and she hurried out of the room.
Impatient, I lasted one minute waiting in the living room before racing down the hallway. By the time I reached her, she was off the phone. She told me to get my coat, that we were going to get Dad.
I pressed her for details, and she gave me a desperate look. Her eyes scared me. They darted around the room frantically, as if looking for Anthony, who was out with his friends. “Francie, Dad … tried to kill himself.” Her words rolled out like an apology. He had checked into a motel by the highway, where he swallowed a full bottle of pills and drank a handle of vodka.
Dad entered Tewksbury State Hospital. In the weeks that followed, he underwent intensive group and individual therapy. He was sober for twenty-eight days straight. When he returned home, he told us he’d met a guy in the hospital who became a friend. That friend had a place out west, in Arizona. Dad was sure he could go to the desert, stay with his friend, stay clean, and then come back to us a new person. He said he just needed to get away for a while. He’d come back—he promised—just as soon as he got his feet on the ground again.
In June he took a train westward with nothing but a box of Saltine crackers and called us from Phoenix three weeks later. We heard in his voice that he had been drinking. His sentences were choppy and nonsensical. He asked Mom to send him money to take the three-day train back home. And when she did, he came back to us.
For one full year, from that summer of 1995 straight through the following spring of 1996, Dad kept leaving for and returning from Arizona. Every month or so, I’d hear Mom on the phone with him, agreeing to send him whatever money we had. Each time he returned to us, he’d inevitably find that staying sober in Medfield was worse than drinking alone in the desert. He convinced Anthony to apply to Arizona State University, saying that the Southwest was going to be a great place for the two of them. And despite Mom’s pleas and tears, Anthony went with him in the fall. I hated that part of the country, if only for the reason that it had lured them both away. I realized that their leaving took Mom away, too—to work. I kept the televisions on in every room of our empty apartment to combat the loneliness that comes with silence.
When the next June came, and I was a blink from finishing sixth grade, Dad called. I knew from Anthony, who saw less and less of him the longer he was there, that Dad was drinking heavily. I even knew that Dad had, on more than one occasion, drunkenly humiliated Anthony in front of his friends.
And now he needed money again. He needed to come home, I heard him tell her over the phone. She didn’t have a dime. Part of her knew that it was best for Anthony,
who had decided to take a semester off from school, and me that we not live with an alcoholic, albeit our dad. The other part of her loved him fiercely and wanted him home, safe and sound regardless of sobriety. She also remembered the three previous times she’d sent him that same money.
“Rob, I’m sorry, I can’t.”
With that, she passed me the phone. My heart raced, not knowing whether to support her decision and act like a grown-up, or to tell him that I missed him and wanted him home, which was the truth. He asked me to convince Mom to send him money. He told me how much he wanted to come home, how different things would be this time.
“But Dad, you never change … you never get better. Mom’s right.” I choked on my own words. “You shouldn’t come home.”
And through the spiral telephone cord, I felt his eyes close. A nod. I heard what he didn’t say: I can’t believe you said that, Andrea. I hate you for saying that, Andrea. But … I know. I know. And as I told him I had to go, I felt my throat close up. I felt as though I’d swallowed my heart.
On Sunday, November 23, 1997, the night before I was supposed to have read all of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol for English class, the phone rang. I sat on the edge of Mom’s bed as she picked up her bedroom phone.
She turned to face the wall, and I stared down at Dickens. I heard the phone click back in the receiver.
It Was Me All Along Page 4