“I am terribly sad that you all had to learn the details of how your dad actually died. He would never have wanted you to know how he struggled. He could not bear the reality that something so powerful as addiction had control over him. He felt that his willpower should have enabled him to conquer this demon. He was certain that once I learned this last of his secrets, I would abandon him. It was very difficult for both of us, but because within my own family I’ve already struggled with alcoholism and mental illness, I did the best I could to remember that addiction is also an illness. I could not bear becoming a cop or a judge. I found a very supportive twelve-step group for families affected by drug addiction, and have leaned on them since May.”
My ice-cloak kept me from feeling sorry for Carol. It kept me from feeling much of anything. I didn’t care that she’d found a group of like-minded sufferers to commiserate with, didn’t care that she’d decided that addiction was an illness and not just my father’s mental illness and selfishness destroying everything and everyone, taking everything from her. I didn’t care about much of anything, really, except this last awful thing he’d done.
you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children
you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,
you are going to want to die.
In Philadelphia I made contact with the little boy’s adoptive mother, and a few weeks later, my sister and I went back to Connecticut to meet him. By then, I had heard the whole story—how my father’s last son, David, had been born addicted to crack and crystal meth, six weeks premature and with only one kidney, a common birth defect, I learned, for babies whose mothers abuse cocaine. How DCF had first taken the baby away after his birth mother had given him half a bottle of infant Tylenol and left him alone for twenty-four hours so she could get drugs.
I learned that my father had beaten David’s birth mother when he found out she was pregnant and been arrested for domestic violence. She said that his birth mother had tried to kill herself, but that it wasn’t a serious attempt, just a cry for help. She said she’d seen my father just once, in court. “He was a tiny little man, and he had an oxygen tank.”
By then I was angry; so furious that I couldn’t sleep. My rage melted the ice, heated my skin, had me kicking the blankets and sheets to the floor. I couldn’t stop thinking about a little baby, a baby like my baby, and how my dad had brought a child into the world and decided not to love him or care for him or support him or even see him, how he had put that child at risk. If he had wanted to hurt himself, make a fool of himself, scare and threaten people, harm other women, damage me, that would have been one thing. But he had hurt a child, a little boy who’d done nothing wrong, and I was so angry I didn’t know what to do with myself. I joked to my friends that I wanted to dig his body up so I could kill him again.
The week after, the autopsy report finally came. “The examination pertaining to the death of your father has been completed and an amended certificate of death filed with the Registrar of Vital Statistics in Rocky Hill. The cause of death has been determined to be ‘Heroin Intoxication.’ The manner of death has been classified as ‘Accident.’ ”
David is eleven now, smart and stubborn and funny, with one of the most gregarious, winning personalities of any kid I’ve ever seen. He charms adults, makes friends wherever he goes, slips in easily when he’s with my girls or my niece and nephew, and is Phoebe’s idol. (“I loves him,” she said dreamily, late one night when she was two and a half and almost asleep. “He bes nice to me.”) He spends summers with us and some vacations. My girls treat him like a brother and my mom helped him learn to ride a bike in the parking lot of the Corn Hill beach, down the road from our summer house. “I bet you never thought you’d be hanging out with Dad’s love child,” Molly teases, and Fran says, “It isn’t his fault.”
When he is old enough to understand exactly how we’re related, and what my father did, I will tell him that he didn’t deserve to be abandoned, to have parents who wanted nothing to do with him. No kid deserves that. I tell myself that I didn’t deserve my father’s treatment, either, and wonder which is worse—to have parents who reject you from the minute you exist, or to have a father who loves you, then doesn’t.
If my father was a character in a novel I was writing, I would find a way to redeem him, or at least make sense of him, to craft a backstory that explained his descent into addiction (abusive parents? molested as a child? some terrible secret from medical school?). I would make sure that the people he hurt got a happy ending. I’d have Carol meet a charming widower at her twelve-step group; I’d have my half brother grow up confident and strong.
But this isn’t a novel. This is life, messy and imperfect and sad. This is what my father left me, the good—the enduring closeness with my siblings, how we’re a team now and have one another’s backs—and the bad, which is everything else.
Sometimes I think about the reading where my father harangued me, how he called on Father’s Day to ask for money. Maybe I should have cut him a check; written a thank-you note. Thank you for hurting me, thank you for leaving me, thank you for breaking me, because the broken places healed and got stronger, because now I can understand everyone who’s been left, been hurt, been abandoned. Thank you for making me able to see that, thank you for letting me grow up and tell stories.
But the truth is, I’d trade that ability, and everything it’s brought me—all the money, all the fame, all the people who feel less lonely because of something I wrote—to have my dad back as he was, to have him not have done this final, terrible thing.
• • •
In the days after my father’s death, I talk to everyone I can find who knew him, or saw him, during those last years, which includes his second wife. “He’d get a gleam in his eyes when he talked about the four of you. He had a black-and-white picture of you on a slide that he loved and looked at,” she said. “He’d talk about making you sandwiches, and how he was the one who’d cut the nails.”
I don’t remember sandwiches, but I remember him cutting our nails—that one good thing. I remember sitting on his lap, the tiny metal scissors with their curved blades, his big hand warm on my little one, each careful snip. I hated cutting my own daughters’ nails when they were babies. They’d squirm or flinch or pull away, and I’d feel so clumsy, like I had a giant’s fingers, and a few times I’d end up cutting past the quick, leaving them bleeding and wailing and looking up at me with wet, accusatory eyes. My father’s fingers were steady, even though the scissors looked like something from a doll’s house in his hands. I would lean against his chest, be enveloped by the warmth of his body, his smell of starch and soap and cologne. I would hear his heart beat and feel his beard, coarse and ticklish against the top of my head. Be careful, I can hear myself saying in my high, little voice, and he would tell me, with his deep baritone rumbling through his chest, Don’t worry. I would never hurt you.
Men and Dogs: A Love Story
And so, as any good chick-lit writer must, I end my story with the happy news: dear reader, I married him.
“Him” is Bill Syken, and he is tall and dark, with a deep voice and a slow, measured way of speaking that reflects his slow, measured manner of looking at the world.
I met Bill when I was twenty-three and married him when I was forty-five. It took us considerable time to make it to the chuppah, but I was not lacking for love along the way. My whole life, I’ve had boyfriends and I’ve had dogs, and sometimes I think that the dogs were the important ones, the faithful companions who watched over me, who taught me how to be a grown-up and how to get along in the world.
My first boy/dog combo was Marcus and Mort. Marcus was an older guy, the twenty-three-year-old, college-graduate brother of one of my best friends, the guy I dated from the time I was sixteen until I was twenty-three. It was not, in retrospect, one of the world’s healthiest relationships, and I hung on t
o it long after I should have let go. But, again in retrospect, I can see why I clung so hard. Being with him when my parents were getting divorced allowed me to re-create some semblance of a family, the structure and support and love that my mom and dad couldn’t provide.
The entire time Marcus and I dated, we were chaperoned by the family bulldog, Mort.
My father would go through phases of brief, intense infatuations—with foods (homemade yogurt, a seed-and-grain mixture he called “birdseed”), with beverages (homemade seltzer, made with specially purchased cartridges of gas; Grolsch beer, which came in heavy green glass bottles with white ceramic stoppers and which my father bought, I suspect, mostly because he liked saying the name), and with dogs. In 1982, a few years after our last poodle died, he and my mother purchased a pedigreed English bulldog that my father named Ramona Lisa. Ramona was fawn-colored and, at about twenty-five pounds, smallish for a bulldog, with an L-shaped tail and a deeply underslung jaw. She was bad-tempered and mostly indifferent or hostile toward people, which made her an anomaly in her breed.
Bulldogs are, in general, sweet, lazy dogs who want nothing more than to loll around in the sunshine, collecting pats and treats and compliments. They also, unfortunately, have all kinds of health issues that range from breathing problems (the result of faces that look like they’ve been flattened by frying pans) to hip troubles to an inability to reproduce without human assistance.
I was not there the day my father introduced Ramona to her swain, a champion bulldog named Hartford, but the union was productive. Ramona had six puppies, six hamster-size light brown, doe-eyed miniature bulldogs with floppy skin and needle-like teeth. We sold five and kept Mort. His ears flopped forward in a way that precluded his ever becoming a show dog, and he lacked the kind of regal mien, the lordly nonchalance, that characterizes champions.I He was a sweet and needy puppy, with a mostly white face, oversize white paws, and an enormous head, stumbling around in his droopy skin like a little boy in his father’s suit. His flews, the fleshy bits in front of his mouth, were plump and white-furred and pink on the inside, and they’d flap and buzz when he snored, which was frequently. Mort might not have been a champion bulldog, but he was a champion sleeper.
Ramona was short-tempered and snappish. Mort was easygoing and affectionate. The two of them together reminded me of a sour, widowed mother and her kindhearted, not entirely bright bachelor son. Ramona would snarl at Mort when he’d nose up to the food dish before she was done, and he’d slink away, head hanging in apology. On the rare occasions when he’d forget himself and try to hump her, rather than one of our legs, she’d turn on him with Fatal Attraction–level wrath.
Ramona died young, after her intestines looped around each other, another common bulldog mishap. For weeks, Mort would wander the house bereft, his droopy, wrinkled face looking even more wrinkled and droopy, sniffing every corner, snuffling at every closed door as if he could find her, waiting in the basement or accidentally closed up in a closet. Gradually he came out of his funk and settled into his reign as the sole dog of the house, a dog who would wag cheerfully when you unleashed him, then stroll halfway around the block before deciding that he’d had enough and collapsing with a sigh, belly down, into a convenient puddle.
My sense is that Mort had very little in the way of long-term memory. Every time we left the house, it was as if we were abandoning him forever, and he’d crowd our legs as we made our escape, or huddle, brokenhearted, by the door. When you came home, though, it was an unbelievably happy ending. Mort would wag! He would twirl! He would heave his chunky body into the heavens, tail-stump whirling, every flap and wrinkle proclaiming boundless joy.
It was the summer before my senior year in high school when I met Marcus. With long blond hair; round, gold-rimmed glasses; an English degree; and no job (and hence free time), Marcus could not have been more appealing to pretentious, insecure, sixteen-year-old me. He struck me as smart and thoughtful and mature, a man who, unlike the boy I’d dated my junior year, would not lead me on, professing affection for six weeks before dumping me for one of my teammates, a man who wouldn’t mind that I was bigger than girls were supposed to be, who would see past my thick thighs and my stretch marks and appreciate my wit and my intellect and the beauty of my soul.
Marcus introduced me to the Talking Heads and the Smiths and Laurie Anderson and, one night when his mother was out of town, to sex.II I lost my virginity on the pullout couch in Marcus’s family’s den, with a fire in the fireplace and my itchy red-and-black-plaid wool pants on the floor. After months of heavy petting and, more important, years of reading about it, I was eager to have sex, but I was just as eager to shuck those itchy pants that I couldn’t quite button. I was sixteen; we were responsible; and even though the act itself left me wondering what all the fuss was about (had Judith Krantz lied to me? I’d had much more fun by myself!), I thought I was in love. Marcus talked about books and poetry, Verlaine and Rimbaud, not just who’d done what to whom at the party on Saturday night. He took me to movies at Hartford’s one art-house theater, so while my classmates were watching Top Gun and Karate Kid sequels, I was bettering myself with films like Mona Lisa, A Room with a View, and Hannah and Her Sisters (I watched Top Gun on the sly, on my own, and listened to Meat Loaf and Eddie Money cassettes in private, playing R.E.M. in the car when I drove anywhere with Marcus).
I wasn’t supposed to be dating a guy that old. My parents forbade me to see him. They asked me why I thought a man his age was interested in a teenager. “Because I’m advanced,” I moaned . . . which, in retrospect, explains why a teenager would want to date an older guy but does not say much about the guy, and why he’d be courting a girl just three scant years past her bat mitzvah. But I was a high school senior, with a strong will and a driver’s license. There wasn’t a lot they could do.
When they told me no I ignored them, tearfully declaring that I was in love, that I needed him, that I would die without him. My parents were unmoved . . . so I snuck out of the house and went to see him anyhow. At which point, they gave up. My father had moved out by then and was no longer there to enforce the rules, and my mom was, I think, doing a kind of triage, deciding which problems she had to cope with and which she could safely let slide. She was trying so hard to keep herself together, to keep the family from cracking. Everything she’d expected, everything she’d been told to want had exploded in her face, in the most embarrassing manner possible—I learned this later, but my father’s first affair, the one that made my mother tell him “You’re either in this marriage or out of it,” was with one of Fran’s colleagues at the alternative school where she taught social studies and history. She was alone, and, I am guessing, the subject of gossip; she was, quite suddenly, broke; she had four children, three of them in the throes of adolescence; she had endless demands on her time and her money—soccer games and crew meets, college applications and the application fees, property taxes and federal taxes. She had two boys who’d gulp down a gallon of milk and gobble loaves of bread and pounds of cold cuts when they came home from school, then wipe their lips and ask what was for dinner, and a not-quite-ex-husband who’d sometimes show up at the back door, crying and saying he was sorry and who would sometimes arrive at that same door brandishing a shovel, telling her that that was HIS car, HIS Audi, HIS house that HE had paid for, and if she didn’t give him the keys right now, he’d smash the door down.
Marcus wasn’t there for that particular shit-show, the night before my high school graduation. My mother locked herself in the bathroom and Mort cowered under the kitchen table, whining, and Nanna whispered, “Do we call the police?” as my father shouted and ranted and wept outside the back door, on the deck where we’d once gathered, as a family, for corn on the cob and grilled chicken. We ended up turning off the lights and waiting until he roared off in his beloved Corvette. The next day, I was one of my class’s graduation speakers. I delivered my remarks while my father, in a Tom Wolfe–ian white suit and panama hat, lurked outside th
e chain-link fence around the football field and drove off without congratulating me. After that, I wanted Marcus with me when I was home at night. He made me feel both loved and safe. As did Mort.
“Mort, come up!” I would say, patting the couch where Marcus and I would be sitting, watching the foreign film we’d selected (Marcus, I think, was secretly delighted when the teenagers at Blockbuster would mangle the titles on the boxes. “Santa San-gria?” “Santa Sangre,” Marcus would correct, with a flourish, as if all suburban seventeen-year-olds should be intimately familiar with the names of Mexican-Italian avant-garde horror films).
“Come!” Mort would crouch at my feet, eyes shining, tail-stump rotating vigorously on his bottom. He’d want to do it, but, clearly, he’d forgotten how to move himself from the floor to the couch since the last time he’d accomplished that feat, probably the night before.
“Mort! Up! Come on!” I would urge, patting the couch, and he’d whine and wriggle and put his front paws on the cushion and then, typically with a boost from me, heave himself up into position and lick my face in a way suggesting he could barely contain his joy.
After everyone had gone to bed, Marcus and I would pull the pillows off the living-room couch, gather blankets, and make a nest. Mort became our duenna, our chaperone. While we lay entwined on the floor, Mort would stroll into the room. We would freeze, holding our breath, trying to be so still that he’d ignore us and go away, but usually I’d start to giggle, and then my entire body would be convulsing, shaking in silent mirth. Mort would approach, tail wagging, clearly hoping to join in the fun. First he’d nudge at my head with his nose. He’d sniff and lick at my neck and cheek, a move I called Mort’s snaffle. Then he would try to wedge himself between us.
Hungry Heart Page 36