Then came the twin tragedy.
Kathy and I had been playing around in my swimming pool. The pool had always been a place where I could escape my parents. I would hold my breath and go underwater and dive for pennies at the bottom of the deep end and make everything else stop.
I was underwater when the telephone rang inside the house.
My mother came out with the cordless phone.
“We’re swimming,” I said. “Say I’ll call back.”
“She says it’s important,” my mother said. It was Jill, a girl who had never called me, not since elementary school, when I used to go over to her house after school to look at her parents’ copy of The Joy of Sex. I wrapped a towel around myself and took the phone.
There had been a car accident. Stefanie’s mother was dead.
No. It wasn’t possible. No! Even my father said so when I hung up the phone and repeated the words aloud. Stefanie’s mother, dead.
“No,” he said, “that can’t be. You’ve got it wrong. You mean Stefanie’s grandmother died, you must mean grandmother. You must have heard wrong.”
I wondered and doubted myself, too. The kitchen was spinning. I wanted him to be right, but no, Jill had definitely said mother. It couldn’t be; it wasn’t fair. Stefanie’s mom was energetic and warm, giving and funny. She’d always struck me as the best kind of mother.
“Let’s pretend it didn’t happen,” I begged Kathy. “Just for ten minutes.”
She nodded solemnly. We got back in the pool and finished our game. Kathy was the swim coach and I was her star diver, preparing for the Olympics. Then we got out and dried off. It felt like we left our childhood in that water. Soon—maybe that same day, or more likely the next, the timing is a blur—we went to Stefanie’s and sat on her bed along with her other close friends. Monica called from Spain, where she’d gone to stay with a family friend for the summer after her mother’s funeral. At the cemetery Karen held me as we stood in the dirt, and I felt guilty for shaking and crying as much as I did, as if I were trying to call attention to myself, but I couldn’t stop.
For the week after the funeral, the family sat shiva. Stefanie’s family had been active members of the synagogue. Men from B’nai came over to make a minyan, a prayer quorum, so that Stefanie’s father and younger brother could say the Mourner’s Kaddish. There were coverings on all the mirrors, and small cardboard boxes for Stefanie and her father and brother and grandmother to sit on if they wanted; there were tranquilizers to take. Stefanie wore a black ribbon pinned to her top.
I wanted to be with her as she sat in her bedroom. My mother made me return to work at the insurance company where I had a summer job as a file clerk. The company was owned by Jill’s father and he would have understood, they were family friends with Stefanie’s parents, but my mother said I couldn’t risk losing the job, that I needed the money for college. I hid in the dark aisles of the basement file room and cried until it was time to go back to Stefanie’s house.
I resented my mother for that, and for all the other times she hadn’t understood me or what I felt was important, but at the same time I didn’t want her to be the one who was dead. That past spring she’d been rushed to the hospital from school. The diagnosis was unclear. She’d felt faint, she’d had bleeding and chest pain, she had high blood pressure (which she took pills for); she was approaching menopause and was at risk for developing type 2 diabetes. But she wasn’t dying, she just needed to lose weight and exercise and eat better. Even so, I couldn’t sleep at night, thinking about Monica’s mom, and Stefanie’s mom, and mine, wondering what was worse, a good dead mother or a bad alive one.
NINE
MY PARENTS AND I pulled through the gates of Vassar College in our Toyota van and entered another world, one of turrets and ivy and beautiful, almost grown children. I wore a plain black pocket T-shirt from the Gap, inexpertly cut-off thigh-length denim shorts, a Debbie Gibson–style black bowler hat, and an extra twenty pounds.
On our third round of carrying boxes up the stairs into my dorm room, we saw them: Franny, her mother, Claire, and Claire’s live-in boyfriend, Sam. They seemed a different species. Franny was a muse in the making. She was delicate, skinny, disorganized, and brought suitcases crammed with vintage blazers, wool miniskirts, and cream silk blouses. She had wavy brown hair, Dr. Martens, perfectly worn-in Levi’s, and a pair of Bakelite plastic bracelets around her slender wrists. Claire was spritelike, an artist with a pixie haircut in shiny black wide-legged pants she’d sewn herself. Sam was younger, in his late thirties, and wore sneakers and a hoodie. Franny’s father, I’d soon learn, used to write an ultra-hip nightlife column, and lived downtown. Weeks later, Franny shyly showed me a photo of herself as a child sitting on Andy Warhol’s lap. Her family was what my mother, in her color-coordinated teacher outfit, and my father, in his sensible Rockport walking shoes and Dockers chinos, called bohemian.
Franny and I approached each other awkwardly. We’d spoken on the phone earlier that August but only once; I’d dropped a note off with her doorman, and she’d called. At my parents’ prodding, I’d asked if she might want to go 50/50 on dorm room essentials. Sitting on my childhood bed, I’d started down my list. An answering machine? A refrigerator?
“A refrigerator?” She’d laughed. Her lack of concern felt revolutionary. “What music do you like?” she asked, her one question. A test, I realized.
“The Smiths,” I answered. “Depeche Mode? Um, James Taylor.”
“Oh,” she said noncommittally.
Now we were here, together. She tacked up a Bell Biv DeVoe poster and played a Jimmy Cliff album, The Harder They Come, on her record player. I tried to decipher this new formulation of cool. Vassar had fewer than twenty-four hundred students, just twice as many as had attended my high school. We had the run of a pristine campus with tennis courts, a lake, chapel, dorms that looked straight out of the English countryside, and the most beautiful college library in the country. Franny knew everyone already, or at least it seemed that way.
Franny had gone to the best private schools, and she was descended from the Mayflower Pilgrims and a wealthy blue-blood family (though her trust fund had dried up and she was on financial aid, like me). While I’d been at suburban keg parties, Franny had spent her teenage years at downtown clubs.
Vassar attracted similarly well-connected New York City kids who were artistic and intellectually curious—good but not necessarily workaholic students who’d crossed paths at interschool parties and beach houses. And here they were, knocking on the door of my room to see Franny. By the time we’d unpacked, tall skinny boys at the peak of their sexiness, with baseball caps and one-hitters, were sprawled on her bed, playing conscious hip-hop on my pink portable stereo. The sound track of freshman year was A Tribe Called Quest’s debut album: “Bonita Applebum” and “Can I Kick It” and “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo.”
As part of our financial aid packages, Franny and I had work-study jobs, but they were genteel old-fashioned ones that wouldn’t interfere with classes or socializing. I served afternoon tea in the Rose Parlor on the second floor of Main Building. Franny made posters for the career counseling office and could work from anywhere, so she’d join me. We’d bill $4.50 an hour while sitting on Victorian settee couches, a grand piano by the window and the timeworn carpet in college maroon. Franny traced letters onto her poster boards before committing to colored marker or black Sharpie. With my reading sprawled out beside me, I checked the hot-water levels in the tea urn and refreshed the cookie plate on the quarter hour.
Unexpectedly, we became fast and best friends. In those long nowhere-else-to-be afternoons, we’d start up our conversation wherever we’d last left off. Since we were together more than we were apart, our reports were on the smallest, most intimate scale: what happened in class, on the way from class, what happened the summer before seventh grade. We had existential conversations, too, about who we were and who we wanted to be in the world. Money, we felt, was not the goal. What
was, then? Love? Goodness? Beauty?
Franny was taking the famous Vassar art history survey, a math class, and beginning Spanish. I had introduction to theater, a Shakespeare course, and American politics. Together we signed up for intro to sociology. We took ourselves and, on occasion, our studies seriously. That first year I went home for the Jewish holidays with a thin copy of The Yellow Wallpaper and a fat copy of Émile Durkheim’s Suicide, which I read on the family room couch, to my grandmother’s dismay. Franny and I listened over and over to the music we could agree on—cassettes of the Police, Talking Heads, Squeeze’s Cool for Cats, Bob Marley, that Jimmy Cliff record, and lots of early R.E.M. Our room was kept warm, all the campus buildings were, and we’d go around shedding and donning layers. Franny signed up for drawing and painting classes and carried her oversize sketchpad across campus. She didn’t bother getting the charcoal out from under her fingernails and was always doodling in her notebooks. She wore her hair back off her face in barrettes. The vintage jackets and the wool skirts and the cream blouses stayed in our closet; instead she put on the same Levi’s and two thin wool sweaters layered under a blue zip-up sweatshirt that reminded me of the kind my father wore. In our room with a cigarette in one hand, she’d draw micro-universes in shades of gray. Sometimes she’d draw me.
We smoked everywhere: in our rooms, in the large smoking section of the dining hall, in the bar, on the steps in front of the library. Franny smoked Marlboro Lights, and I got used to the taste and switched my brand to hers, sometimes even daring to charge entire cartons at the school bookstore on my student account, which was paid for by my parents and to be used for books and tampons and toothpaste. The cigarettes were itemized under “miscellany.”
We bought cheap forties of beer to drink before going out, to save ourselves money and the effort of waiting on long lines at the kegs. When Franny drank, she was sweet beyond measure. At parties, affectionate and giggly, she’d sit cross-legged in a corner and focus in on me for the umpteenth time that day. Unlike a boy, who might talk to me when drunk or high while scanning the room for better options, her attentions were unflagging. We’d wake up together and go to breakfast at the dining hall, walk each other to class, meet at the library, make plans for dinner and for later on at the campus bar. We’d part and meet and part and meet again. We fell asleep talking and woke up with more to say. When she found an older boyfriend with a single room, she made a point to spend some nights at home with me. With Franny, I came to feel safe, chosen, awash in friendship, companionship, and love. These were new feelings.
* * *
In our room, with the beds pushed along opposite walls and our heads still only a few feet apart, we told each other our life stories. Her parents’ divorce, our respective family money problems. As another late-night talk session edged toward dawn, each of us smoking in our bed, I decided I would do it. I would tell Franny the truth about my father. I had never told a friend before.
“If I tell you something,” I asked, “something about my father, will you promise not to hate him?”
She nodded.
I took a deep breath. “My father hit me,” I said. That’s how I formulated the problem in my mind. It was easier to think about and say hit than abused. I put it in the past tense like that—hit rather than hits—because 1) the violence had pretty much stopped by then, and it had been a while since he’d done anything worse than yell or threaten; and 2) I thought it sounded better, like I’d already put the problem behind me.
“What?” Franny said, startled, reaching for another cigarette. Her father hadn’t been around much after he and her mother had separated when Franny was two. But I could tell by her voice, and the way she looked at me from across the width of that narrow room, reevaluating me, that she thought this was a much bigger deal. I hadn’t realized before that it would be.
Franny was sympathetic and asked the right questions but didn’t judge or question why I accepted my parents’ money and kept up the front of having a happy family. We were used to imperfect fathers, to pretending that everything was fine when it wasn’t.
* * *
Franny’s father wrote an essay for a magazine about their relationship. She’d gone to the city for the photo shoot but was embarrassed about the piece now that it was actually coming out. We walked to the college bookstore for a copy and read it on the checkout line. He described being a shitty, absent father until Franny was in high school and old enough to go out clubbing with him. He mentioned that she sometimes went to sleep in her clothes and slept until the afternoon. She was mortified but also half flattered. I understood. I knew the familial trick of scraping off the bad, humiliating parts of an experience. Her father was a famous writer. Her photograph was in a magazine. I bought my own copy and brought it home to impress my family.
* * *
Semesters passed. Intimidated by the classically beautiful, waiflike girls with creamy complexions and oatmeal-colored hair looking over their lines while waiting for their names to be called at auditions, I gave up on being a theater major. I wasn’t meant to be onstage after all, I decided. I couldn’t compete. I’d rather be in the library reading and avoiding rejection. I’d rather be with Franny and the rest of our friends, drinking and talking all night.
Franny didn’t judge me for my failure. I took women’s studies, personality theory, modern dance, abnormal psych, a class on gender and colonialism. She studied Caravaggio and began an independent study on Chicano mural art. We read Virginia Woolf and bell hooks and Hannah Arendt and Audre Lorde and John Berger and Adrienne Rich and Susan Sontag and Karl Marx. Together we took a class on the 1960s, and later, a philosophy course on love.
During those four years, I spent more time with Franny than I’d ever spent with anyone outside my family—more, considering the difference between a shut door and a shared room. We even became depressed at the same time: Who could go the longest number of days without showering, without shampooing? Who could stay in studying more than two nights in a row? We egged each other on, whether to drink more or to get better grades. We read our papers aloud to each other. We got bronchitis and kept on smoking anyway. When my father cursed or threatened me, I held the phone up so she could hear. She shook her head, reminding me that he was the crazy one, not me. Franny was appalled that my father would ever have laid a hand on me, and I loved her for her indignation. We made pacts. She read to me from her journals, and I confessed what I’d been afraid to write in mine. Then my nightmares started up, nightmares that would plague me for the next twenty years. I dreamed of my father chasing me with a knife, of my father coming to kill me. I’d wake up soaked and screaming. Franny was there to comfort me.
Along with the rest of our friends, we’d jump up and down on our single beds and sing and dance at two in the morning to Billy Joel’s “All for Leyna” or the Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun.” We’d sprawl on a couch in the turrets of the college library, holed up in the reading rooms there, alternating between studying and intimacies. In the dorm, we procrastinated on our papers in the early-morning hours and pulled all-nighters, talking through our problems with our tight-knit group. We’d lie on a bed together, two or three or four girls at a time, sharing family secrets. One father had done time in federal prison for a white-collar crime.
Late one night, my head on a friend’s lap, I decided to say something. I felt cocooned by them, protected and safe and far away from my family. Franny knew my secret, but the others didn’t.
“My father abused me,” I told them. I had gained confidence by then. Their eyes widened. “Physically,” I rushed to add.
I played down even this confession. It wasn’t like he’d raped me. He hadn’t ever broken a bone or sent me to the emergency room. I hadn’t been locked in a closet, or deprived of food, or choked until I passed out, or made to bleed until I lost consciousness. It wasn’t that big a deal.
“He’s changed, though . . . I think.” I wavered. Maybe I’d miscalculated. Maybe this was a mistake.
“He wouldn’t do that to me now. He hasn’t hit me in over a year.”
My girlfriends smoothed my hair. I wanted them to know I still loved him. I didn’t want them to act weird on parents’ weekend. Though I ached to talk about my childhood and needed my friends to take my side, I couldn’t stand to have any of them hate my father, not even Franny, in part because that meant I’d no longer pass as a “normal” person, with parents who loved me.
* * *
I found out the truth about my great-uncle Leo during a phone conversation with Josh in my freshman year. Either Josh forgot that I hadn’t been told or he figured I should have been.
Uncle Leo hadn’t died of lung cancer after all, Josh said. Leo had hanged himself.
I couldn’t believe it. Leo had committed suicide in his seventies, after escaping the Nazis, moving to New York, and devoting himself to taking care of Bertha. Everyone in my family knew but me. So that was why I hadn’t been allowed to go to the funeral, I realized, furious at my father for deceiving me. Mostly, I couldn’t stop picturing Leo hanging by a rope in his apartment.
When I called my parents and asked why they’d kept this from me, they said at sixteen I was too young to handle the truth. They’d lied in order to protect me, they explained. Maybe they didn’t want to put any ideas into my head.
* * *
Back home in Rockville Centre over Thanksgiving or Christmas break, I wanted to tell Kathy about my father but was scared of what she’d say or think. Would she believe me? We were in her room, sitting on her bed. She listened and went pale. Kathy had known it was bad, that something was off about my father and family, but she hadn’t realized just how bad. She didn’t know about the hitting.
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