Watching wine take effect is like documenting evolution in reverse. After one glass, they were funny and nice. After two, some of them were a little short-tempered. The third glass touched off a fight about food or politics or household finances. If a child spoke at that time, my father might snap at them: children were meant to be seen and not heard, he’d say. It happened to Muffet and it happened to Margot and it happened to me. It didn’t matter what I said, whether I was joking or just making an observation. He’d shut me right down. He and I were the two most athletic members in the family, and we liked to compare notes on exercise. I would tell him where I had hiked that day, how long it took, who else was on the trail. When he was sober, he would listen enthusiastically and ask encouraging questions. But when he was drunk, he would push back competitively. If I said I did the trail in two hours, he’d say he did it in an hour and a half. If I said I was out with the dogs at eight, he’d say he was out at two in the morning. His three-drink self was almost the opposite of his normal self.
Often, that third glass was just the end of the first act of the Wine Time drama. Then there was an intermission. Adults would regroup. Kids would go to bed. The fourth glass would start the cycle all over again. A fifth and sixth would often follow.
After the heart attack, there were new things to fight about too. “What about her?” I would hear my mother say. Or: “Maybe she would care.” I didn’t know who she was talking about, but I had older sisters to help me out. Margot, in particular, loved to torture me with information. She’s the one who told me that while my father was in the hospital, he had some kind of affair with a nurse. I don’t know how far it went. It may have been more romantic than sexual. I imagined kissing, at least. For my father, of course, an affair with a nurse while recuperating was hardly a neutral event—his own father had fallen in love with Agnes von Kurowsky while he was in the hospital in Milan during World War I, and she had been the inspiration for Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms. The affair with the nurse, Hemingwayesque though it might have been, further bruised my parents’ already fragile relationship.
One evening the three sisters were in Muffet’s room, getting ready for bed. Margot asked me if I had heard. “Heard what?” I said. Margot turned and looked at Muffet meaningfully. “What?” I said again.
Margot sat down and clasped her hands. She had big news to deliver, and she was going to be as dramatic with it as possible. “Mom and Dad might get a divorce,” she said.
I was horrified. The idea knocked me back onto the bed. Then I thought about it for a minute. “Wait,” I said. “What’s divorce again?”
* * *
SLOWLY, MY DAD SETTLED BACK in to the swing of things, and life in Idaho moved along smoothly.
Summer was the yang to the yin of winter. I took my puppy, Mr. Bubba, out to the lake and climbed rocks without using ropes. I swam in the river and rode my bike back while I was still wet, letting the sun dry me and feeling the satisfaction of athletic challenge. I hiked back to the resort and charged food to the J account at the Sun Valley snack bar. I had also started buying myself stomach medicine. I was preoccupied with the idea that germs might appear in the house if we weren’t vigilant, and I kept a small stash of medicines in my room to protect us. I also developed a mortal fear of throwing up. I had seen my parents throw up from alcohol, probably, and I didn’t like those implications at all. A little later, I would see Margot throw up from bulimia, though it’s possible I saw it earlier than I think. Whatever the cause, it wasn’t a normal fear, the aversion that nearly everyone has to the feeling of queasiness; it was something extreme.
Slowly, my dad settled back in to the swing of things, and life in Idaho moved along roughly. There was no divorce—my parents seemed committed to the marriage, no matter how fraught it became—but the tension intensified. It was especially bad whenever company came over, because that meant a promise of happy times and the inevitable disappointment of departure and unhappiness, and more drinking, which meant more fighting. Around this time, I started sneaking into my parents’ bed while they were still downstairs. I would stay there and listen to the conversation, trying to separate the laughter from the angrier tones.
I often fell asleep, though usually not for long. Sometimes the noise that woke me was yelling. Sometimes it was my mother coming into the room. She wouldn’t intentionally wake me up, but she would make a ruckus: she would drop the toilet seat loudly, run the water too long, turn the lights off and on. Then she would get in bed and sit with me and cry and tell me about her sad life with my father. One night, she might lament that my father no longer showed her affection. “I used to have beautiful clothes,” she’d say. “Your father used to give me all the money I needed for them. Not anymore.” Another night it might be about the road not taken. “I wanted to be a flight attendant,” she’d say. “But I was too tall.” In those moments, she inhabited a world that was even worse than the real world, one where none of her dreams or destinies were available to her, where she was ill-used and neglected. It was almost like a grand old dame of the theater or the silver screen complaining that the world had passed her by. Her stories were never especially detailed or imaginative; she got quickly to the central point, which was that she was deprived, and after a little while she seemed to lose her head of steam. That’s when the TV went on, mostly with detective or cop shows.
When she dozed off, I would tiptoe downstairs, careful not to wake anyone. By that time my father was asleep on the couch or, more often, downstairs in the basement, and I would make sure that the living room was clean. It was easy to do in the middle of the night. It was just me and the water in the sink and the wine poured down the drain. I would clear away not only the dishes on the table but also the broken bottles that were sometimes thrown, and occasionally I’d have to wipe off spots of blood from the walls where someone had cut themselves. The house smelled nice during the day, of food or baking, but it was different after a fight: staling wine and the strong smell of cheese left out for hours. Our cat, Kitsy, would watch me from the little box where she ate, which was on top of the food warmer. I would wash the good crystal glasses by hand. My goal was to make the evening invisible, to create a situation in which people could wake up the next morning, come back to the living room, and not remember even a shred of the night before. Sometimes it worked like a charm, and the next day was normal again; I’d help pull weeds in the garden, and then my parents would let me ride my bike to town.
I found new ways to occupy myself. I fancied myself a fabulous modern dancer, which basically meant that I would dance on my own to whatever was on the stereo: the Moody Blues, Antonio Carlos Jobim, a Doug Sahm song called “Sunday Sunny Mill Valley Groove Day” that reminded us all of where we used to live. I was in love with Carole King like nearly every other girl in the country. Certain bands, though, struck me funny, in the sense that they gave me a bad feeling: “Spinning Wheel,” by Blood, Sweat & Tears was something I associated with a fight between my parents over Muffet, and whenever I heard it I tried to hear another song in my head immediately. The same was true of the Grateful Dead. They reminded me of Muffet before she began acting strange, and thinking of her as she used to be was too sad to bear.
My mother wasn’t as interested in music. She listened to talk radio and watched morning television; she had been a Today show regular since it debuted in the early fifties. My mother was also the one who sat with me and watched television shows. She liked cop shows and crime shows, and I watched them all with her: Mannix, Hawaii Five-O. I thought I was a genius because I could always figure out Mission: Impossible. And then on my own, I watched The Waltons. I loved it for all the reasons I was supposed to: the big family, the intimacy, the low levels of conflict. It was proof that there were families that said good night to each other and houses where no bottles were thrown.
* * *
EVERY SUMMER, FOR A WEEK, my parents would send me to Oregon to stay with Mary Kay and Dan, my godparents, who lived on a farm w
ith no kids and lots of animals. When I was with them, I sewed, fed chickens, and picked baskets full of vegetables out of Mary Kay’s garden. They had an attic filled with dolls and dollhouses, toys and baby clothes, all handmade, and I could stay up in the attic or in a room right next to theirs. My choice. I also was drafted into helping Mary Kay with her booth at the state fair. She dressed me to match it. She won ribbons, and I felt like I was winning them too. Mary Kay and Dan loved me with all the love they had stored up for babies that they couldn’t have. It was so easy to be with them. They didn’t drink, so no one ever changed. I was just me, Mariel, in the orchard or the attic or on the porch swing doing nothing at all. I was the center of the world there. Or, more accurately, I was away from being the center of the world I knew. Without Margot, without Muffet, without my parents, I didn’t have to worry about cleaning up after a fight, or being picked on, or feeling sad as I watched people I loved injure each other. I also noticed something strange, that I seemed to fit well in this other world. So much of my identity up to that point had come from being the calm in the storm, the stable daughter in a family that was always spinning out of control. When I was stable within stability, it felt strange: not unpleasant, but unfamiliar.
* * *
MUFFET AND MARGOT kept our bathroom filled with products: hair sprays, skin creams, oils, lotions. As we all got older, I inherited a larger share of the bathroom, which meant that I inherited a larger share of the clutter, and clutter wasn’t something that I could tolerate. “Clean this up,” I would say to no one, and then I would do it myself.
One Saturday morning, a few days before fifth grade was set to start, I went to clean the bathroom. It was tricky, because while Muffet probably would have been okay with it, Margot didn’t like anyone to interfere with her world. She didn’t really see the mess she was making, but she was certain to see the absence of it.
I started to clean, but right away I was distracted by a bottle of Sun-In. It was a hair lightener, and it made you look like you were “kissed by the sun.” I loved the sound of that so much that I repeated it out loud. “Kissed by the sun,” I said. My hair was blond, but my mother called it “dishwater blond,” which meant that it didn’t glow the way that other girls’ hair did. Maybe Sun-In was the answer.
I read the directions on the bottle and sprayed a little bit on my head, but after five minutes of watching the mirror, nothing was happening. I sprayed again, and then one more time, and then I started watching myself in the mirror again. Still nothing.
I put the bottle away and left the bathroom. It was August, and there were other things to do: swim in the river, go to the pool, lay out on the deck. My mother loved to go out on the deck and tan. She had a huge reflector that she tilted up so that her face caught the most sun possible. I sat with her as long as I could, but out of the corner of my eye I saw a range of things beckoning to me: pets like Kitsy and Mr. Bubba, the trampoline in the yard, the cage with our new parakeets. The next day, I swam in the pool and then sat outside in the sun; the day after that, I went swimming in the river and biked home.
The third day, I noticed my hair getting blonder. I was thrilled, and then I was nervous: it didn’t stop at yellow blond but went right on through to orange and then a kind of reddish blond, and then suddenly it was the first day of school. “I don’t want to go,” I said. “My hair looks weird.”
“You’re going,” my mother said. I held my breath right up until the front door of the school, and then I exhaled with relief. Sun-In was everywhere that year, and plenty of kids, boys and girls both, showed up with hair the color of brass. By the time school pictures were taken, my own real hair had grown back in, darker than anything from the Sun-In. I looked like a bumblebee.
* * *
MY FATHER’S LIFE after his heart attack, and his determination to keep the family in line, only meant more separation from my mother. And that separation made him isolated in nearly every way. He accommodated his isolation most of the time, but then there were the moments when he would rebel against it. At some point, I noticed a marked change in how my father dealt with my sisters. There was a turn in the way that he showed them affection and in the way that they allowed him to do so. Over the years, I have sometimes wondered if there was anything going on behind closed doors that I didn’t know about, anything improperly intimate or even sexual. To be clear, I didn’t see anything untoward. No one ever said anything to that effect. It’s hard for me to even imagine. But I force myself to wonder because there was such a persistent sense of unease in the house. In the contemporary world, where children are vigilantly protected, people do some of the wondering for me. They use words like “violation” and even, sometimes, “molestation.” I reject those words because they seem like impossible words to use without proof. I know only that my house was defined in large part by a father who was sad and lonely and who could only really admit it to himself when he drank. My mother, whatever her strengths and dreams, was cruel to him at a basic level. She dismissed him and made him feel smaller. My father was then left with some aspect of his basic humanity untended. He turned elsewhere in the family for affection. He may have made my sisters feel uncomfortable when they were adolescents and young women. It may have been more than simple discomfort. But I can’t say exactly what it was. It isn’t that I won’t say. I can’t say. I don’t know. I never saw anything to suggest specifics. We lived in a complicated house. All the relationships were unhealthy and unbalanced. They were messy, not necessarily sexually, but emotionally and psychologically. Who got attention? Who deserved it? How was basic affection parceled out? What was the cost of feeling good about yourself?
Years later, I raised these issues in a documentary about my family, and when I went to promote the film, I would talk to crowds after screenings. More than once, someone in the crowd would stand up and thank me for my frankness regarding sexual abuse. The first time it happened, I was stunned. I didn’t know what to say because I didn’t think that’s what I was talking about. In my mind, I was talking about the fact that human beings are fragile, even into adulthood, and that the things they do to shore themselves up are sometimes done without concern for the fragility of others. As an adult, I have seen other adults be inappropriate in their affections with children because they were mad at spouses or disappointed in themselves. The vast majority of the behavior isn’t sexual, and it’s not abuse in any clear way, but it’s unquestionably an aggressive and unkind continuation of an unhealthy family dynamic.
Much of my thinking on this topic has come together in the years since I was a child, of course, but some of my instincts are the same as they were back then. One of the central questions that occurs to me is this: Why, when people hear about discomfort in a family, do they immediately imagine the most taboo acts? As a culture, we’ve singled out one kind of interaction and decided that it’s the worst thing that can happen to a person. But that’s misleading, not because it’s not horrible, but because it obscures and trivializes the hundreds of other ways that a family can betray a child, most of which are far more nuanced and complex, more interwoven into everyday life. When we draw a bright line, when we put certain things on one side of that line and call them abuse in such an obvious way, it prevents us from dealing with the other things. You could make a real argument that my mother’s behavior was just as sick if not more so, that her relentless criticism put conditions on ordinary affection. When she was nice to me, nice without any complication, I remember feeling like her kindness was a valuable secret that belonged to me and me alone. But that also meant that I couldn’t share it with anyone else or it would be a betrayal of her trust, and she might withdraw even that small amount of affection from me.
None of this is to excuse or absolve my parents but to try to explain their behavior—and, most of all, to explain the way my sisters and I behaved in the face of their behavior. I remember that my father was sad much of the time and that he grasped at ways of feeling better, whether through drinking or through
escape. He reached out and all too often found nothing there to comfort him.
5
THE MOTHER IN THE HOSPITAL
“STOP IT,” I SAID. Margot was telling me what I should and shouldn’t do, bossing me around.
“Shut up,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I do,” I said. I was eleven. I didn’t have to put up with her anymore. I thought about standing up and leaving the room. But we weren’t in a room. We were in an airplane, winging our way east toward London. After a few days there, we were going to continue on to Paris, where we would meet up with Muffet, who was working with a French author, translating his work into English. She was heavily medicated, and as long as she stayed on her regimen, she was more than functional.
The flight was an hour long, and then another hour. It seemed like it might never end, especially with Margot next to me. I closed my eyes, leaned back in the seat, and thought about my peacoat. My mother had taken me to the store and bought it for me before we left, and much of what I thought about myself in London came from imagining myself in that coat, warm and safe in the cold wet weather.
The plane finally landed. The tires screeched on the runway, but I had never been so relieved to hear an unpleasant noise before.
We were tourists in London like any other tourists, doing all the things that Americans do: walking the streets endlessly and pointing at landmarks like Big Ben and City Hall. I especially liked the Tower of London, where the royal jewels were kept under guard. I marveled at the way that the Beefeaters at the Tower stayed emotionless and rigid, eyes looking straight ahead. They were charged with focus and duty, and they were honor-bound not to react to anything in their field of vision, no matter how distracting or ridiculous. To me they were the strongest people in the world, and they also were familiar: that’s how I felt at my house, like I had to see things and not do anything, to observe and not react.
Out Came the Sun Page 5