Estranged

by Jessica Berger Gross

  Other times the conversations took different turns, about money or girlfriends or career prospects, and Josh or Mark would be the ones to leave the table angry and hurt. The undercurrent of the arguments about politics and culture wars went unspoken. I hated my father for what he’d done to me, and I hated my mother for letting him. Maybe my brothers did, too; I couldn’t be sure. They seemed to have accepted the violence in our house as normal.

  * * *

  My mother had a few close friends. For several years she and my father even threw an annual dinner party where they’d pass hors d’oeuvres before serving a sit-down meal. But my mother kept them all at a certain remove, and eventually most of those friendships withered and died. Constance married a well-to-do businessman whom my father believed looked down on us. Gail’s husband was a tax attorney and occasionally appeared on the Today show around tax time, which must have been challenging for my father’s ego. Madeline left the classroom to become an administrator and, according to my mother, came to think she was “too good for us.”

  My father had only one friend, an older psychiatrist named Dr. Resnick who smoked a pipe and lived in a big house a few towns over. He was a mentor from my father’s graduate school days, and my father mostly called him for career advice. To me, the Resnicks seemed intriguingly erudite. They gave me a pile of books for my bat mitzvah, including A Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh and a college dictionary and thesaurus, instead of a check. One Saturday the five of us went to New York for dinner at Café Español on Bleecker Street and then to see The Fantastics. My father drove that night, swerving across lanes erratically and stubbornly and way too fast. The Resnicks asked and then begged him to slow down and drive safely, but my father was in a controlling mood and refused. Their friendship ended, too.

  * * *

  When I was sixteen, my mother took me to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get my learner’s permit, and my father began giving me driving lessons. My mother was said to be the worst driver in the family and had no patience to teach me, so it would be my father who would take the project on, as he had with Josh and Mark. He prided himself on his skills as an instructor and especially as a driver. When he felt like showing off, he could back out of the driveway with his neck craned over his shoulder and reverse down the entirety of our street. He could weave in and out of city traffic using sidewalks and illegal turns. He could steer using just his knees, with no hands on the steering wheel. He could parallel-park with a stick shift into the most crammed of spaces. A radar detector sat on the dashboard to help him avoid cops and speeding tickets. From time to time he’d roll down his window, stick his arm out, and offer the finger by way of hand signal.

  I just wanted to be able to pass my driver’s test so I wouldn’t need my parents for rides. But first I’d have to learn to drive stick shift. The blue 1976 Toyota Corolla now had dents and a missing fender and a broken driver’s seat and was the family’s spare car, the one I’d be allowed to use once I got my license. I couldn’t wait.

  My father seemed genuinely excited about teaching me. We’d drive slowly around the neighborhood and he’d smile encouragingly, lecturing me about blind spots and how to use my mirrors. But I couldn’t get the hang of the clutch. No matter how many times he told me to hit the clutch and gearshift now, we’d end up stalling out. He soon lost patience and decided I was damaging the car on purpose.

  One weekend we drove the fifteen minutes to Long Beach to buy sneakers at the indoor flea market where you could find discounted Keds or high-top Reeboks or K-Swiss. Then we started practicing. In the center of the large near-empty lot, I revved the ignition, engaged the clutch, and attempted to shift gears. The car jerked and stalled out every time.

  “You shit,” he said. “Get out of the car. Get out of the goddamn car!”

  I unbuckled my seat belt, grabbing my bag even though I had just four dollars left in my wallet, and slammed the car door shut. Whatever. It wasn’t like I wanted to go home with him anyway. “Dickhead,” I said under my breath.

  He circled the parking lot a few times before coming back around a minute later, pushing the passenger door open. “Get in,” he said. I did. We were miles and miles from home. Way too far to walk, and I didn’t know the bus routes. He started to drive. He never stalled. Fuck him, I thought. Fuck him fuck him fuck him.

  “You ungrateful little shit,” he mumbled before starting to drive home like a maniac.

  I failed my driver’s test twice but passed on the third try, when I was seventeen. The Toyota Corolla was mine, at least to borrow when I was allowed. By then the ax had disappeared from underneath the seat. Fuck him, I thought as I peeled out of the driveway and headed for Kathy’s, or to hang out with the “freaks” at my friend Karen’s house, or to the diner or the beach or wherever my gas money would take me.

  * * *

  I was in my usual spot, smoking a cigarette on the back stairs off the kitchen, when my father pulled into the driveway.

  “I have some bad news,” he said, carrying his briefcase in from the car.

  I flicked my ash, unimpressed.

  “Uncle Leo died,” he reported.

  Leo’s wife, Bertha, had died only two weeks earlier. It seemed completely implausible, the two deaths one right after the other.

  “Sometimes that happens,” my father said. “Especially when people are married for a long time.”

  He made it sound romantic. As far as I knew, Leo hadn’t even been sick.

  “How?” I asked my father. “How exactly did he die?”

  “Lung cancer,” my father answered, pointing to my cigarette. “It went undetected until the very end. You really need to quit.”

  I hadn’t seen Leo in a long time, maybe not since he’d handed me a check for a thousand dollars at my bat mitzvah, a check my father had deftly taken from me when he’d seen all those zeroes. “That’s meant for me, not you,” he’d explained. “For your college.”

  I should have visited Leo more. He was my favorite relative, and I’d hardly known him. I could have gone to see him on my own after my father lost interest. I should have. By then, I was taking the train into the city on the occasional Saturday and hanging out downtown. I might have splurged on a cab or attempted the F train or asked for his address and figured out the walk from the Village to his apartment. But that hadn’t occurred to me, and now it was too late.

  I didn’t cry. I didn’t know how sad I should allow myself to be. I wanted to at least go to the funeral, but my father said I was too young and that it wasn’t worth missing a day of school, given how much my grades counted for college. Besides, there was some rumbling and resentment over the will. We’d been left money, he explained. My father went by himself.

  That was the last I heard or saw of those people from the wedding album. My mother said family was everything. And yet we didn’t talk to ours. My father had stopped mentioning his sister, Edna, around the time she moved away. It was as if, after this several-year interlude of trying to reconnect with his family, he was once again an only child.

  EIGHT

  SOMETIMES I’D TAKE the Long Island Rail Road and spend the weekend in the city with my ETC friends. Jolie lived in a bookish apartment in the East Nineties, an address that sounded dangerous to my mother even though officially it was on the Upper East Side.

  Jolie taught me how to thrift-shop. Digging through a bin at Goodwill one Saturday morning, we found brightly colored cotton Indian skirts and a cream Esprit fisherman sweater that I’d wear all through the rest of high school and college, until it unraveled. Downtown, we tried on fringed suede coats that I couldn’t afford at Antique Boutique, and window-shopped the shoe stores on Eighth Street. We went to dinner at a Chinese restaurant because they served free red wine with the meal, even to teenagers. I kept my bag, a canvas army-surplus cross-body, absentmindedly hung over my chair and a middle-aged woman seated nearby put down her New Yorker and came over to our table.

  “This is New York City,” she
said, showing me how to tuck the bag under the table so that I could feel its presence between my feet.

  Eleanor, another ETC friend, lived in a town house between Park and Lexington. Her apartment was many times the size of any I’d been in before. Her bedroom had two twin beds, with loads of space between them, and a private bathroom. The night I slept over, I forgot my toothbrush. When I reached into my backpack to fish it out and realized my mistake, I kept quiet. I couldn’t imagine stating my pedestrian problem in such a grand setting. And for whatever reason, skipping a night of brushing didn’t seem like a good option. Instead I used hers, hoping she wouldn’t notice.

  But Eleanor did notice. “Why is my toothbrush wet?” she asked.

  Eleanor was studying photography and had been accepted to Yale, and I was hopelessly south shore Long Island, certain I’d never belong in New York. There were no more sleepovers with Eleanor after that.

  * * *

  Before my senior year, I studied poetry and drama at the Bennington July Program. Julie was planning on going and said I should, too. I spent my savings. We lived in houses together, and I took drama and a poetry class where I wrote about sitting on the tree stump during kickball. My teacher asked us to raise a hand if we’d ever been bullied or felt alone, and every single person did. My friends and I made up alter egos. Mine was Phoebe Rose Winestein, and a couple of kids even thought that was my real name. One night I let a roommate cut off my shoulder-length hair. My best friend that summer was kicked out for smoking pot and drinking, even though we were both high the night she was caught.

  When it was time to go home, I panicked. I couldn’t face returning to the reality of my family life. My resident adviser was a Bennington college student with long platinum dreads. On our last night, she sat with me on the porch of the residence house in the summer twilight. I felt sad and scared and at the same time comfortable enough to make my first-ever confession.

  “My father,” I said. I couldn’t stop crying. “He hits me.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “I can’t go back there,” I said.

  “Just one more year,” she said to me, as if she heard this kind of thing all the time, as if she knew just how it was, her arm stroking my back. “One more year and you’ll be in college and free. You only have to get through one more year.”

  * * *

  By fall I was counting the days until graduation. Kathy was busy with her boyfriend, who was the captain of the football team and drove an old decommissioned taxi. My older drama friends were away at college. Julie and Karen had boyfriends, too. Monica turned popular. I made a few more trips to the city, but mostly I stayed home, or went to rehearsal, or worked on my college applications, and hung out with Stefanie.

  Stefanie and I had known each other since elementary school but hadn’t become real friends until the eleventh grade. Once we did, we became intensely close. We’d fall asleep at night with the phone pressed to our ear, catching up on what we’d missed by not being friends earlier. Stefanie was into school and volunteering. She didn’t care about going to parties like I did; she didn’t even seem to care about having a real boyfriend, which had continued to be my unrealized mission in life. On Friday or Saturday nights we’d drive to Pizzeria Uno a couple of towns over and order a large pie with a plate of nachos to start. We’d eat until we were full and then eat some more and have hysterical laughing-crying fits. We laughed until we cried and then laughed again at the constantly expanding running list of in-jokes between us. We declared it was cool to be nerds.

  I was almost out of Rockville Centre and almost out of my parents’ house. But while I pretended not to care about keeping my weight down or my social life going, I was an anxious wreck. I was plagued with headaches and developed a nervous tremor in my eye. In bed each night before falling asleep, I planned my funeral. Who would be there, what would be said, and how sorry my parents would be when I was gone. I imagined ways to kill myself, debating slitting my wrists versus taking pills, and considered what I’d write in my suicide note.

  In the spring of my senior year, I was stage manager of the musical and waiting to hear from colleges. Feeling stressed out and depressed, I worked up the nerve to make an appointment with the school psychologist, a graduate student who came in one or two afternoons a week. He used an office in the guidance department, two rooms down from a guidance counselor who was friendly with my family.

  He had me sit. We had no privacy. Anyone walking into or out of the front doors of the school could see me through the window facing the faculty parking lot. Why had I bothered coming? I couldn’t show him the deep cut on my thumb where my father recently drew blood by digging his nails into my skin, or explain that, though the violence had mostly ebbed, it still haunted me. If anything, my feelings toward my father, who was a constant source of stress and tension and fear in my life but also, I thought, the parent who loved me the most, were getting more complicated and difficult to manage. I couldn’t say anything at all about the abuse. My mother was in the building.

  Instead I pointed out the window to a boy at the commons who always blew me off and was rude to me and whom I secretly liked. I liked boys who didn’t like me back, I confessed. I didn’t want someone who wanted me. Then I admitted to having self-destructive thoughts. And how I felt comforted when thinking about dying.

  The grad student told me to wear a rubber band around my wrist. “Here’s what you do,” he said. “When you have a negative thought like that, take the rubber band and snap it.”

  I never went back.

  I earned A’s in English and social studies and in my creative writing and drama and music classes but just got by in science and struggled with math. My verbal and math SATs were uneven by hundreds of points. In my high school, that wasn’t considered normal. The “smart kids” were supposed to be good at everything and take advanced or accelerated classes in every subject. I didn’t even take math and science senior year. Every night before bed, I paged through the same book about college admissions to calm myself. Schools don’t want well-rounded students, the book said, schools want well-rounded classes made up of talented individuals.

  My mother wanted me to go to a state school to save money and said she’d buy me a car if I did. I wanted to go to a small liberal arts school. I applied to SUNY Geneseo for her sake, and to Oberlin and Grinnell and Kenyon and Bennington and Vassar for mine.

  Vassar was my first choice. The weekend I’d spent visiting the campus had felt like an idyll sprung from the pages of an editorial fashion spread, or at least a J. Crew ad. Vassar is known for their “beautiful people,” another college prep book read. I couldn’t get over the library with the stained glass, the chic students, and the corduroy-wearing professors. The school was a fantasy of beauty and art and cool kids. I had to get in. I filled the blank “Your space” page on the Vassar application with my bad poetry and what I thought to be an artistic black-and-white photo I’d taken of empty auditorium seats. Mr. Goodman wrote my letter of recommendation and made a phone call to a former student of his who worked in the theater department.

  Meanwhile, Bennington College offered me an academic scholarship. My mother was panicked; she worried that Bennington was a “druggie” school. Bennington had no grades (teachers instead wrote evaluations) and just five or six hundred students, only a small percentage of whom were male, and none of whom my mother suspected would turn out to be Jewish, straight, and interested in her daughter. She certainly couldn’t imagine my meeting a husband there or getting properly trained for a professional career, the two points of college in her mind. When I called my RA from the Bennington summer program, she confirmed that many students did indeed eat mushrooms, drop acid, and/or take Ecstasy on the weekends. “But it’s not like you have to,” she reassured me. I had only smoked pot. It sounded a little out of hand, even to me.

  When the Vassar letter came and I was IN, I convinced myself and my mother that I had to go, that Vassar would change my life, that my futur
e would be completely altered by this decision. My father didn’t fall for it. Vassar was offering financial aid, but there would be loans and a hefty parental contribution. Bennington would be less than half the price, the same as a state school or even cheaper. It was a no-brainer. He was right. (It’s not like they force-fed the drugs at Bennington, and I bet I would have started writing there.)

  But I wouldn’t listen. I cried, I screamed, I railed at him. I acted every part the entitled spoiled brat he’d said I was. I didn’t care. I wanted and needed this escape to another world. I felt I deserved the extreme financial sacrifice, my reward for staying silent and putting up with them. Vassar was my end of the twisted bargain we’d struck: hush money. Then Mark called and said I owed him big-time—he’d talked to our father and explained that life was all about connections, and that connections were made in college, and that Bennington was for druggies. Mark knew about worlds none of us had entered. He’d taught us about scallions and venture capitalists. At Vassar, Mark explained, I’d meet a rich husband or get hooked up with a career or at least get into a better graduate school. One day, maybe even Mark himself would pay our father back for the loans. Whatever he told our father, I was going to Vassar.

  * * *

  The summer before college, something terrible—two terrible, impossible somethings—happened. Monica’s mother was dying of cancer. All year long she’d been going through treatment, losing her hair, turning puffy and sick-looking and frail, but somehow managing to help Monica through the rites of senior year, from applying to college to going to the prom. To my shame, I stayed away. I couldn’t handle the awfulness, couldn’t handle death, and I didn’t know what to say to Monica. We weren’t as close since she’d changed social scenes and gone from suburban punk to preppy, but that wasn’t enough of a reason for me to watch like a coward from the sidelines. Other friends were braver. Stefanie was at Monica’s house all the time.