Hungry Heart

by Jennifer Weiner

  Marlene was the good girl: blond, feminine, an academic standout who skipped a grade and finished college at nineteen. Frances sounds like a precursor to my sister, Molly, with a twist of my older daughter, Lucy—willful and smart and stubborn, determined to get her way and willing to throw terrible tantrums to make it happen.

  “Oh, yes, she was a handful,” says Nanna, her voice clear and vibrant on the phone. Nanna celebrated her hundredth birthday six months ago. Her mind is still sharp, and her memories of her younger daughter still make her sound both rueful and amused.

  “She was the exact opposite of Marlene. She was fun but hard to handle. She wanted her way, and that was it!”

  Fran’s lackey and worshipful sycophant was her cousin Sharon, Nanna’s brother’s daughter. Freddy had come home from the war with a Purple Heart and courted and married Ruth, a war widow with a young daughter. He’d adopted Sharon, who was a year younger than my mother and who, according to Nanna, would have done anything for Fran’s approval.

  “Your mother would tell Sharon, ‘We’re going fishing. But you have to get up early to get the fish.’ So Sharon would get up at four in the morning, and we’d hear her in the kitchen, making Frances her cheese sandwiches . . . and then your mother would make her go outside and dig the worms!”

  Fran loved lemon meringue pie and taking big biographies out of the library. She hated to clean. “She never hung anything up. Not one thing. It was all either on her bed or on the floor. I wouldn’t clean in there, and I told Margie, the girl who cleaned for us, not to go in there either. I said, ‘She knows where everything is.’ And then,” Nanna says, pausing dramatically for the punch line, “at camp she got a blue ribbon for the neatest bunk. I never got over it. A blue ribbon!”

  Nanna’s favorite Fran story unfolded in New York. Nanna and Pappa had gone on vacation with Freddy and Ruth and Sharon and Marlene and a seven- or eight-year-old Fran. “We stayed at the Waldorf, and money wasn’t that great back then. They wanted dessert, and I said, ‘We’ll order a piece of pie for every two people, and we’ll share.’ Well, your mother wouldn’t have it. She wanted her own slice! Sharon said, ‘I won’t have any. Frances can have mine.’ She was so crazy about Frances that she’d let her have anything. But your mother insisted. She had to have her own piece. So we got her her own piece.”

  Girls weren’t allowed to wear pants to school back then. Fran didn’t care. “I can’t tell you how many times I got called to school to come in and talk about her—about her clothes, or that she was annoying people. I’d tell them, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do a thing about it. She refuses to wear a dress.’ ” She and Pappa considered private school, “but that didn’t appeal at all. There was nothing we could do but get her through to college.”

  Now that I have girls myself—one of them a tomboy who’d rather have her nails pulled out than have her hair blown dry, who’d rather give up her iPhone than put on a dress—I can imagine what my mother must have been like, the fights over clothes and shoes and hair, the negotiations and threats and bribes. In the Fran and Sharon stories, I hear echoes of my daughters—willful, stubborn Lucy, demanding to have things her way, and sweet, placating Phoebe, saying, in her piping little voice, “It is okay. She can have mine.” I can imagine how Nanna must have decided when to fight and when she’d just let little Franny ride off on her bike, dressed in a checked shirt and cowgirl boots and pants.

  When my mother was seven, her parents decided that she was old enough to spend her summers at Camp Tanuga, a sleepaway camp in northern Michigan. My mother loved camp—loved the freedom, loved the outdoors, loved paddling a canoe and learning to play tennis. She and her sister went for ten summers, each going from camper to counselor. Marlene eventually met her husband there.

  At Mumford High in Detroit, Fran was a three-sport athlete, and ran for student council with the slogan “NO B.S.*,” in big letters, with an asterisk below attached to the words “BETTER SECRETARY,” in smaller type. She followed Marlene to the University of Michigan, where, if she’d been like most girls, she would have been expected to find a husband and to choose between the two available, acceptable careers—teacher or nurse.

  My father’s childhood was more complicated. His father, Abe, was a contractor, an enormous, jovial man who weighed three hundred pounds when he died at age fifty-three. Abe loved a party, loved to play cards, and had a sharp sense of humor. Visiting a potential client’s house, he’d survey the kitchen or bathroom they wanted renovated, discuss his proposal and his price, then smile. “Sound good?” he’d ask . . . and, when the homeowner would politely agree, he’d say, “Then let’s get started,” and lift a sledgehammer over his shoulder, bringing it down to smash a bathtub or a countertop, thus ensuring that he, and not another contractor, would be hired to fix the damage and do the job. I wonder about that story a lot; about the way that my dad looked when he told it. What message were we supposed to take? What moral were we meant to draw from his smirk, his raised eyebrows, his pleased expression? When we grew up, would we be rewarded for sliding around the rules like that?

  His mother, like my mother’s mom, had been born with the name Fanny, and again, like my mom’s mom, had changed it to Faye. She was Canadian, and one of my father’s earliest memories was learning the roster of American presidents, helping her study for the citizenship test. Faye was always well dressed and proper, her hair sprayed and set in a bouffant, in lipstick and crisp dresses with narrow leather belts. She liked things tidy and quiet and clean, but she’d married a man who liked noise and tumult, liquor and cigarettes, a man who chose to be out of the house a lot, leaving her alone with her children. For adult companionship, she had her husband’s two sisters, Ann and Alice, who both eventually ended up institutionalized—Ann for schizophrenia and manic spending sprees, Alice for intransigent depression. They were both given electroshock therapy and, at one point, they were both in the same facility, where Alice refused to speak to Ann, even when they were wheeled past each other on their way to the treatment room.

  Like my mother, my father had a single sibling, a sister, nine years younger, named Renay, spelled phonetically to ensure it would always be pronounced correctly. When Larry was left in charge of his sister, he’d roll her up so tightly in a quilt that she couldn’t move, then abandon her. Or he’d tell her that John Beresford Tipton, the titular star of The Millionaire, had stopped by while she was in the bathroom, and that he’d had a check, but when my dad said Renay was unavailable, he’d headed off to another little girl’s house.

  Like my mom, my father went to public elementary schools, but then he attended an Orthodox yeshiva after school, traveling from his suburb to Detroit’s old Jewish neighborhood because, he said, the yeshiva bus stopped on his corner, and so his parents put him on it. It was a strange way to grow up, trying to observe the dietary laws and religious rituals that his parents had abandoned. His only friends were his cousins. Ann and Alice had both given their sons the same name, although one was Allen and the other was Allyn, always called “Zissl,” which was his middle name. For his ninth birthday, my father used to tell us, his parents bought him a bicycle . . . only he wasn’t allowed to ride it. Too dangerous. Besides, his mother was already thinking about medical school, and surgeons had to protect their hands. My father was allowed to go visit his bike, to look at it in the window of the hardware store, but not ride it, not once. Not ever.

  He, too, attended Mumford High, but never met my mom, until he spied her that morning from the Fishbowl and vowed that she would be his.

  So he orchestrated an introduction and invited my mom to come over and watch Adlai Stevenson discussing the Cuban Missile Crisis.

  Larry ushered Fran into a slovenly off-campus apartment. (“Socks,” my mother recalls. “I remember dirty black socks. Everywhere.”) He served her canned Franco-American SpaghettiOs and regaled her with his thoughts on politics. Somehow, all of this led to a second date, and then they became a casual couple for a few months. The romance
sputtered after my dad invited my mother to celebrate New Year’s Eve at a fancy restaurant. He ordered lobster, the most expensive and, coincidentally, the least kosher thing on the menu, and spent the night throwing up in the bathroom.

  “We broke up after that,” my mother reports. But six months later, my dad was back, standing at her off-campus apartment door, with a cigar clenched between his teeth. “Want to go to the track?” he asked. She went. They were married in June 1967, the big, fancy synagogue wedding and sit-down dinner that my mom didn’t want. “Just send me an invitation, and I’ll show up,” my mother told her mother . . . and that is exactly what she did.

  So Frannie Frumin became Fran Weiner, and my father became Captain Weiner. The two of them drove cross-country from Detroit to Louisiana, and my father reported for duty at Fort Polk, hoping desperately not to be sent to Vietnam. They lived in an army-issued trailer, in a town that still hosted the occasional Klan rally. On the night of March 27, 1970, Fran went into labor, and Larry, a physician, freaked out. Arriving at the base hospital, he tried to open a locked door, refusing to give up, insisting that he knew the way in, that his door was the right one, even when my mother toted the suitcase she’d packed around to the back, found the correct, unlocked door, checked herself in, and gave birth the next morning.

  They named me Jennifer Agnes—Jennifer, because they liked the song “Jennifer Juniper” and, isolated as they were, had no idea how popular the name was becoming; Agnes was in memory of Abe, my father’s father, and because they’d seen an Italian movie where one of the characters was a prostitute named Agnesia.

  I was, according to Fran, an easy baby, relaxed and good-natured and given to spending my early morning hours staring quietly at my mobile or my hand. I was the kind of baby who left her parents with the impression that they were excellent, competent nurturers who could easily handle additions to their family. God laughed. Fifteen months later, they had my sister, Molly, who was born faceup and screaming, and has not stopped screaming since.

  When my father was discharged from the army, my mom says that they never thought of going back to Michigan. They were ready to see the country, to live somewhere different, to be on their own, unlike their sisters, who both ended up moving blocks away from their parents and the houses where they’d grown up.

  My father had offers to finish his training in psychiatry in New York City, in Washington, DC, in Boston, and in Connecticut, at the Institute of Living in West Hartford. As my parents drove over Avon Mountain, with a toddler and a newborn asleep in their car seats, Simsbury, Connecticut, must have looked idyllic, like a movie set: sweet, sleepy, small-town New England. There were farms with red barns and fields like green and gold squares of a patchwork quilt. The First Church of Christ stood at the corner of Hopmeadow Street and Firetown Road, its white spires bright against the blue sky. There was a five-and-dime called Leader’s, and an ice-cream shop called A. C. Peterson’s, and a grocery store called Fitzgerald’s where both of my brothers would eventually work, bagging groceries after school. There were ponds where you could swim in the summer or skate in the winter, a recreation complex with pools and courts for tennis and paddleball. The public high school had a crew team that rowed on the Farmington River, and students at Ethel Walker, a private girls’ boarding school, rode and jumped their horses in a vast, rolling meadow across the street from their tidy brick campus.

  Simsbury was eight hundred miles and completely different from Michigan. Simsbury was unfamiliar, un-Jewish, unlike any place they’d lived before. It had an outstanding public school system, and you could get much more house for your money than in neighboring West Hartford, where there were two synagogues and a Jewish Community Center.

  Maybe they thought it would be exciting, a challenge, a fresh start. Maybe they didn’t think about being outsiders, or how their kids would grow up in a religious minority . . . or, if they did, maybe they believed that a childhood spent on the margins would teach us resilience. Maybe they just saw how beautiful the town looked, dozing in the light of early summer, and didn’t think of anything at all.

  With my mother’s parents’ help, Fran and Larry bought a three-bedroom, single-story ranch house at 9 Simsbury Manor Drive, in a part of town called Weatogue, near the base of Talcott Mountain. There were families with kids our age across the street. Our next-door neighbors had an aboveground pool, where we learned to swim. In our backyard, a cherry tree bloomed exuberantly pink in the spring and grew tart glossy-red fruit in the summer.

  My siblings and I grew up in a house full of books. The living-room wall was lined with plank-and-cinder-block shelves that sagged beneath the weight of my father’s medical textbooks and hefty biographies, the books by Jewish authors—Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Isaac Bashevis Singer—that he and my mother both liked, the novels and contemporary fiction that my mother read for the two book clubs she would eventually join. The two of them were readers, too, of books and magazines and the two papers—three on Sundays—that we got. They wanted to raise kids who were readers, too, which meant limiting television to a scant hour a day of PBS (with occasional dips into network programming for Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom) and throwing their library wide open. The rule was that any child could take any book off the shelf and read it, provided we could give an explanation of the story to Mom or Dad.

  In the mornings, my father would put on suits and ties and shiny shoes and go off to work. My mother supervised us, or sent us out to play, or left me alone to read. She’d give us sandwiches for lunch and baked chicken or pasta or steak for dinner, with a scoop of ice cream or three Oreos for dessert. At night, after dinner, my father was the one who clipped our fingernails, lifting each child onto his lap, his hands steady around the tiny manicure scissors, and he was the one who read us our bedtime stories. We’d lie next to him, tucked into my parents’ big bed, and my father would read Grimm’s Fairy Tales or Where the Sidewalk Ends or The Red Balloon. He found abridged versions of Shakespeare and the Aeneid, and collections of classic poems for children. Sometimes he’d make tapes of himself reading “The Charge of the Light Brigade” or “Barbara Frietchie,” and I’d interrupt the poem to ask a pressing question. “Daddy, will you make us French toast tomorrow?” “Sure,” came my father’s deep, soothing voice. “Sure.”

  I must have sensed even then that he was quirky, that he had a strange sense of humor, that there was a darkness about him, that he was different from the other dads. He was fastidious about his clothes, and particular about his car, a silver 1976 Corvette with a maroon leather interior—he didn’t like us touching it, or even, it seemed, looking at it for too long. He hated to socialize, and, sometimes, if my mother had invited people over for a dinner party, he’d hide in the closet, once stomping on a bag of potato chips, like a six-year-old throwing a tantrum, to communicate his pique. But he could be funny, too, growing his beard out every October and dressing like Fidel Castro, with his army jacket inside out, his pants tucked into his boots, and a cigar between his teeth. For an anniversary, he found a cement sculpture of a boar and left it in the shower with a note for my mom: “Fifteen years and it’s never been boring.” I don’t remember cruelty. That came later. When I was a little girl, five and six and seven, what I remember was how much he loved me, how he was kind and gentle and endlessly patient, how he made me feel safe, how he praised me for asking good questions or reading big words; how, when we asked him to tell us a story, he never refused.

  Molly and I and eventually Jake, who was born in 1973, went to nursery school at the Jewish Community Center in West Hartford three mornings a week. While we painted at easels, wearing our father’s cast-off button-downs as smocks, or ate grapes and graham crackers, or napped, my mother swam in the JCC’s Olympic-size pool, and would come get us with her hair still wet, smelling of chlorine.

  Back then, I had a button nose and wavy light brown hair. I was cute in a way I’ve never been since. Molly and I had matching pigtails, and, while my mother’s fashion s
ense could best be described as “not naked,” our grandparents sent us the occasional ensemble, like our complementary T-shirts—mine said KISS ME and Molly’s said HUG ME.

  We lived two blocks from Latimer Lane Elementary School, a new, modern brick building that housed kindergarten through sixth grade. Living that close to the school made me a “walker,” which meant—as unthinkable as it seems now—that when I was five years old and ready for kindergarten, I was allowed to walk, by myself, down Simsbury Manor Drive, then along two blocks of busy Mountain View Road, and across the street to school. I would set off in the mornings, spending the next four hours with Miss Burdick, who’d let me read quietly in a corner—Black Beauty or the Bobbsey Twins, Anne of Green Gables or the Encyclopedia Brown mysteries—while my classmates colored or practiced writing their letters and numbers, and then I would walk home in time for lunch.

  Simsbury was one of the first school districts in the state to offer gifted classes, mandatory enrichment for kids whose IQs were over a certain level. When I was five, my father walked with me to Latimer Lane on a Saturday and, bent over to look me in the eye, gravely informed me that I would be taking an important test, and that I should do my best. For the next few hours, I sat in a guidance counselor’s office, re-creating patterns with black-and-white blocks, reciting back series of numbers and, at the tester’s instruction, drawing a picture of a person. My subject was my father, of course, with his curly beard and his tie and his glasses, and I remember that I kept asking for the paper back, to add another detail—the knot of the tie, his ears, a shoelace. I wanted to make it clear to whoever was grading the test that this was someone of great importance, someone specific and special—my father.

  I don’t know what my score was, but it was good enough to get me tagged as “gifted.” My teachers would give me extra work, sending me home with math word problems, or more challenging addition and subtraction. Mrs. Palen, my first-grade teacher, would let me stay in from recess and write poems, or stories. I preferred reading and writing in the empty classroom to running around a playground in the company of my peers.