But there was a third choice. The one I kept coming back to like a song you don’t like but can’t get out of your head.
He had to go.
Carried Away
All the next day at work as I played hopscotch and ring-around-the-rosy I tried to find another way out, an angle that didn’t involve a gun, a knife, or rat poison.
I thought about calling the cops but not for very long. I’d been trained my whole life to keep cops on a stone wall. And since they went and shot those kids at Kent State, who could trust them? Anyway, I figured they wouldn’t be any harder on Jimmy than they’d been on Hank. Even if they did arrest him—which I wasn’t convinced of since he’d talked his way out of more tickets than I could count—once they let him go he’d be madder than ever.
I stayed late at work that day, mopping up splotches of Welch’s grape juice and sharpening Crayolas, trying to put off going home as long as I could.
I stopped at the Temple Market and bought some Marlboros and smoked a couple.
When I finally made the turn into the projects I saw Jimmy’s car parked in front of our building.
I froze. Then I took off running.
I ran like Shirley’s life depended on it.
I ran faster than I’d ever run—fast enough, I hoped, to finally beat Jimmy.
When I charged through the door I didn’t see or hear anyone. The kitchen was empty.
I ran into the living room.
Shirley was sitting on the couch. Jimmy was kneeling on the floor, his head resting in her lap. She was stroking his greasy hair.
She looked up at me with dead, baby-doll eyes.
“Your father’s coming home,” she said.
Jimmy lifted his head from her lap and gave me a triumphant smile.
“I love your old lady and she loves me,” he said.
Later, Shirley told me he had gotten Papou to come over and talk to her. Papou had said she had to take Jimmy back. He said that’s what Greek wives did and even though she wasn’t technically speaking Greek she was married to a Greek and that made her a Greek wife.
At first, Shirley had held her ground.
I’ve had it, she told Papou. You and YaYa don’t know how he is. He’s nutty as a fruitcake.
Papou put his arm around Shirley, something she couldn’t remember him ever doing before. He reeled her in like a half-dead mackerel.
I know he’s crazy, Papou said. I know he gets carried away sometimes. But he’s crazy about you. How many women can say they have a man who would go to the ends of the earth for them? A man who would kill for them? From now on, I’ll keep him in line. I’ll do that for you, for the family. Because my son’s no good without you. You make him good. Without you, who knows what he could do? You want that on your conscience?”
Dirty fighter, dirty fighter.
Two against one.
TKO.
“Your father needs me. I can’t ruin his life,” she explained to me later.
“What about you? What about your life?”
“Oh, I’ll make do.”
I could have tried to argue her out of it, but I was afraid to say anything. My words were like bullets. One wrong word and she might be dead.
The following day Shirley was back to cooking up a storm, making all of Jimmy’s favorite foods that he had missed in his absence.
As she cooked, she sang a James Taylor song we both loved, one that she said reminded her of Jimmy.
Goodnight you moonlight ladies
Rock-a-bye sweet baby James
Over the next few weeks she baked dozens of Greek pastries dripping with honey for me to take to college.
“So you’ll have something sweet to remind you of home,” she said.
I borrowed YaYa’s suitcase, the same one I had taken to Old Orchard Beach every summer. I dug it out of a pile of junk Jimmy stored in YaYa’s basement—broken lawn mowers he never got around to fixing, duck decoys so eaten away by salt water they’d only fool myopic birds, and half-empty bottles of horse liniment from Jimmy’s long-gone days as a racehorse owner.
“You keep the suitcase as a going-away present,” YaYa whispered to me. “Just don’t tell Papou. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”
YaYa also made me a whole bunch of Greek pastries dripping with honey. The honey was soaking through the box already and made my hands sticky.
Shirley repacked the pastries when I got home. She examined them like she inspected sunglasses at work, having just been promoted from piecework to quality control.
“These can’t hold a candle to mine,” she announced.
When it came time to leave for college, Jimmy refused to drive me.
“Find your own way there, big shot,” he said.
Virginia would have driven me except she’d broken up with the car thief and he’d stolen her stolen Jaguar back.
Ellen couldn’t do it either. She was miserable about not going to college herself and couldn’t get out of bed.
So, Ken, another of my North End friends, offered to take me.
I said good-bye to my dusty stuffed animals and the makeshift bunk beds and our cat, Sylvester, who was really old and slept through my good-bye.
Jimmy left early for the spit box so he wouldn’t have to see Shirley blubbering over me, but Shirley said it was so he wouldn’t start blubbering himself.
She slipped me an envelope with about two hundred dollars. It was in small bills and change, money she had saved up.
“Call when you get there. Ring once and hang up and that way we’ll know you’re OK but you won’t have to pay for the call. If you really need to call, use the change.”
“Promise you’ll call the cops if he gets carried away.”
“Oh, your father treats me good now,” she insisted. “That time on his own taught him a thing or two. He’s a changed man.”
I don’t know if she really believed that.
I sure as hell didn’t.
As I drove away, she watched until I was clear out of sight. So nothing bad would happen to me.
I did the same for her.
Asylum U
I finally made it over the state line.
I crossed the border from New Hampshire to Vermont.
Five years earlier, Susan had headed off to Vermont, bound for medical school, full of promise. She couldn’t make a go of it and now she was back in New Hampshire, back in the nuthouse. Literally. I vowed not to follow in her footsteps.
The first person I saw when I arrived on campus was Paul Newman.
I thought I must be hallucinating since I’d smoked a little pot on the way there, but no, it was really him.
A moment later Rita Hayworth strolled by. What was even weirder was that nobody else seemed to notice either one of them. It was as if everyone had grown up in a world where movie stars were as common as rats at the dump, and only I, the Little Match Girl, thought it was a big deal.
It turned out both movie stars had daughters going to Bennington. Just like me. Sort of.
The dorm I got assigned to was a beautiful old wooden building. I found my room and unpacked. I had only the one suitcase, so it didn’t take long. My roommate had gotten there before me and dumped her stuff, but other than that, there was no sign of her. Several large stringed instruments took up most of our room.
Before long, my roommate, her older sister, and their cheerful dad appeared. The sister was a senior and both girls were classical musicians. The cheerful dad had driven them all the way from Delaware, stopping for a picnic on the way.
“I hope her viola da gamba is not in your way.” the dad said.
I didn’t know what language he was speaking. Spanish? Armenian?
“We’re going to dinner at a French restaurant. Would you like to join us? They make a superb soupe à l’oignon.”
I begged off. I said I had plans with the friend who drove me, the friend who was long gone.
After they left I ate a bunch of baklava and smoked a few Marlboros and tried
to remember the name of that Armenian instrument.
I missed my mother my sister my cat my stuffed animals my room my rickety bunk beds.
I even missed Jimmy.
I took a bunch of change to the pay phone in the hallway and called home.
“I’m here safe and sound,” I said when Shirley picked up.
I watched a cute boy with glasses carry a bunch of musical equipment into his room—keyboards, amplifiers, and some contraptions I later learned were called Moog synthesizers.
Maybe Bennington was really a music school and I had skipped over that part in the College Handbook?
“What’s it like there? Is it all fancy like the North End?” Shirley quizzed me.
“The buildings are kind of old, like up in Canada. And one of them is a barn.”
“They charge up the keister to go to school in a goddamn horse barn?” piped up Jimmy, and that’s when I realized he was listening in on the extension.
“There’s a nice big lawn,” I said.
“Yeah, some poor sap like your old man has to mow that big frickin’ lawn,” he groused.
“Well, I better not use up all my change,” I said.
“Next time, ring once and hang up. Don’t waste your mother’s hard-earned dough.”
“I’m so proud of you,” Shirley blurted out.
“Hang up before you start blubbering,” Jimmy told her.
“I love you, Mom,” I said, trying not to start blubbering myself.
“What about me, dum-dum?”
“I love you too,” I mumbled.
“You better. ’Cause the only reason you’re there is you take after me in the brains department. My genes got you there. And don’t you forget it.”
“I won’t,” I said, and my time ran out.
From then on, most Sunday nights I just rang once and hung up.
It was just as well since I didn’t want them to know how miserable I was.
I’d found myself in a nuthouse like Susan. At least that’s how it seemed to me.
Everywhere I looked, people were behaving strangely. Girls in nightgowns twirled by themselves on that big lawn, dancing to their own private music. Their mongrel dogs ran free and shat on the lawn and the twirlers twirled on it and didn’t mind. Some people walked around stark naked. Others wore giant lobster costumes.
A guy told me he had the mark of the devil on his chest and asked if I wanted to see it.
I said no thanks, maybe another time.
Still, I tried to fit in. I took a beginning music class.
The first day we were told to compose something.
Here’s what I knew about music up to that point:
Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Do.
The professor assured me anyone could compose music. A baby composes when it cries, he said. Music is just sound, and sound is all around.
My fellow classmates didn’t seem daunted by the assignment. One kid composed a piece that consisted of him dragging his chair across the floor, making scraping sounds.
The only sound I made in that class was click. The sound of the door closing as I transferred the hell out of there.
After that I decided to stick with what I knew, literature and science.
I vowed to go to medical school—and, unlike Susan, to make it through.
I got a job selling my body—in an art class, not at a massage parlor. I posed naked while rich kids in paint-spattered overalls that made them look poor created facsimiles of my tits. I was a virgin and had never been naked in front of strangers, but I was used to imagining myself elsewhere—in somebody else’s car or house or city—so that’s what I did. I pretended I was in a bikini on a beach in KooKooLand instead of stark naked and covered with goose bumps in Vermont.
I needed more money, so I got more jobs—washing peanut butter tofu off dishes in the cafeteria and assisting a writing teacher. The money I made paid for cancer sticks and thrift shop clothes. I wore cocktail dresses and antique underwear, men’s baggy suits and a coat made of monkey fur.
I wasn’t the weirdest dresser on campus.
Slowly, I made a few friends, including the cute guy with glasses who played his Moog synthesizers for me.
But sadness kept dragging me down.
I started seeing a campus shrink. It was free, and besides, all the kids at Bennington seemed to have one. One girl’s shrink came all the way from New York to see her. And he always spent the night in her room.
But my headshrinker didn’t help very much. It wasn’t her fault. I was too ashamed to tell her what was really going on. Too ashamed to tell her the real story about my family. I couldn’t even bring myself to spill the beans about what Jimmy really did. I said nothing about pancakes, hot TVs, or juiced-up nags. I kept all that on a stone wall. I told the shrink Jimmy was a landscape architect. I’d never even known such a job existed until a girl in my dorm asked what my father did after telling me hers worked on stupid Wall Street. I got all tongue-tied and mumbled something about landscaping. “Oh, he’s a landscape architect,” she said, like she knew him better than I did. From then on, that was my story. Jimmy Norris the con artist became Jimmy Norris the landscape architect.
After a few weeks, I stopped seeing the shrink altogether. I didn’t feel much like going to classes either. I stayed in bed and smoked cigarettes. I didn’t even eat the baklava that kept arriving from Shirley.
You’ll never fit in here, I told myself. Nevernevernever.
There were just too many things I didn’t know. Too many references I didn’t get. Too many jokes that went over my head. Jokes I wouldn’t have laughed at anyway ’cause I was too afraid to show my Dracula teeth.
Finally, I’d had my fill of feeling like a dummkopf. I was on the verge of packing up and leaving Bennington.
And then Jimmy showed up.
“What the hell’re you doing, dum-dum?” he barked, after throwing open the door and finding me sleeping in the middle of the day.
“Daddy?” I said, groggily.
“I thought I’d come get a look at this clip joint,” he joked. “Maybe I wanna go here myself.”
He had stopped off on his way home from a nearby racetrack. He was hoping to get back into the racing game and had gone there to check out a couple of nags.
I looked down and saw horse manure on his worn-out shoes.
Those shitty shoes just broke my heart. I burst out crying.
Jimmy looked startled. He watched me blubbering for a moment, then yanked the door shut.
“What the hell’s the matter with you? You’re in the lap of luxury here and you’re bawling like a brat. You could be out hustling for a goddamn living like me.”
“I can’t make it here, I can’t,” I blubbered. “I wanna leave.”
Jimmy’s eyes narrowed. He stormed over to the bed. I cringed. I didn’t know what he was going to do.
But he just sat down on the bed next to me and lit a cancer stick. He stared at my overflowing ashtray on the floor.
“It’s a goddamn lousy habit,” he said. “You oughta quit.”
“What difference does it make? We all die anyway,” I blurted out between sobs.
He glared at me. Then he reached out and grabbed my arm with his Hairy Claw.
“Look, no kid of mine goes down in the first round, you hear me? You’re as goddamn good as any of these tight-assed little rich kids. Hell, you’re better. You got something they’ll never have. You got street smarts. You got moxie. You got balls, OK? Even though you’re a goddamn girl. So sit your ass up, go out and get some goddamn Greek penicillin, and show those sons-of-bitches what you’re made of.”
I blubbered a little more and then sat my ass up.
Jimmy didn’t hang around much longer.
He went home.
But I stayed.
I dug in my heels. I studied hard. I tried to stay focused on where I was, not where I’d been.
I was grateful to Jimmy for showing up when he did. Grateful for the father-daughter lecture.
I even missed him a little.
Like always, though, my good feelings toward him didn’t last.
When I called home a few weeks later, Jimmy was out and Shirley sounded awful. I could tell she had been crying.
“What happened? Did he go nuts again?”
“I’m just going through the change of life,” she lied. “It’s nothing. I’m just a little blue.”
“I’m coming home! I’ll get a bus in the morning.”
I was lying too. I was already planning to hitchhike to save money.
“No! You stay there! You got away, you stay away!”
She said she was feeling better already from hearing from me and I should go and have fun.
“I live through you,” she said before she blew me kisses and hung up.
Once again I found myself thinking about Susan. About how she must’ve felt when her college dean showed up and told her that her mother had died. I wondered if she’d been lounging in the library or laughing with friends or blissfully asleep. I wondered if she blamed herself for going off and leaving her mother at the mercy of a father who showed her no mercy.
The next day I hitchhiked into town. It had gotten bitterly cold and I pictured myself stranded on the border between Vermont and New Hampshire in my monkey fur coat that was bald in spots and not very warm. I bought a carton of cancer sticks ’cause it was cheaper to buy them that way, and smoked a few ’cause that was the only thing that seemed to calm me down.
I told myself Shirley was probably OK.
I told myself Jimmy wasn’t as crazy as Hank.
I told myself Shirley was probably OK a bunch more times.
Finally, I crossed to the other side of road and stuck out my thumb.
I headed back to campus.
Why did the chicken cross the road?
Because she chickened out.
Pluck pluck pluck.
I didn’t have balls after all. I didn’t have the balls to save my own sweet mother ’cause I was a weak, stupid, selfish teen-rager.
I could hear Jimmy’s voice in my head telling me that. I could hear him in my goddamn head all the goddamn time. I wished I could get him the hell out. I wished somebody would lobotomize me like that guy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—a book that Jimmy—who else?—had told me to read.
KooKooLand Page 32