While my life at my mother’s was bombastic, life with Pop was monastic. At Katie’s row house, I missed my siblings. We ate steamed or boiled vegetarian meals and had no television. Every night, Pop instructed me to wash up for bed, something that just didn’t happen at my mother’s. As a child, I viewed him as terrifying and strict compared with my mother. I was an imaginative, silly child, but felt compelled to be a proper young gentleman around my father. His logic was intimidating. He was a father who made you feel stupid by simply existing.
He read to me every night. We’d sit in my tiny bed with the Sesame Street comforter and read Greek and Roman mythology, Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Daniel Defoe, or my absolute favorite, Garfield. We used to laugh till we cried each time Garfield mailed Nermal to Abu Dhabi. These were the times I liked my father best—when we were giggling about a fat orange cat and learning about the mysteries of the world.
After reading, he would turn off the light and I would lie there silently for hours, afraid to get up and move around. The city of Bridgeport was quite violent in the late eighties, and I frequently fell asleep to the sound of rogue gunshots. Pop would fetch me from my bed and install me on a child-size inflatable pool float on the floor, next to his and Katie’s bed. He kept a gun in a lockbox in the attic and a baseball bat under his side of the bed. Bridgeport was known as the murder capital of Connecticut. Cars were stolen, houses were robbed, and people were murdered. It wasn’t news; it just was.
No matter what my father did, no matter how many right moves he made, he didn’t stand a chance against my mother. I was switching back and forth between a Chuck E. Cheese and a convent. Naturally, I preferred pizza and Skee-Ball over quiet asceticism. For a five-year-old, there was no contest.
CHAPTER 7
One day in 1991, Nancy received a letter in the mail from Uncle Warren, who oversaw her trust fund. “No. No, this can’t be happening,” she said, despairingly. The Occidental Petroleum stocks had tanked, and her income, already greatly reduced as a result of her consistent borrowing from her principal, would be cut in half. There was no way she would be able to afford her current lifestyle and support her children on these payments. Thankfully, Pete, Missy, and Robbie had already gone away to college, leaving Andrew and James the only kids at home. But all the same, Nancy was hemorrhaging money, and she needed to change her lifestyle drastically if she was to avoid bankruptcy.
Years earlier, she and Stuart had bought an investment home on Reef Road in Fairfield, a shack they rented out to college students. They called it the Barnacle Party House, and Pete’s girlfriend had been one of its tenants. It was actually a shack, infested with flies and rodents, with stucco walls and seven-foot-high ceilings.
Nancy sold the Colonial Drive house, evicted the college students from Reef Road, and moved in with Andrew and James. It was a dumpy downgrade. Nancy, the Greenwich debutante, now lived in a shack with her sons by different fathers. When Pat dropped Andrew off at the new house, he sat in the driveway with his head in his hands and wept. Andrew asked, “Why are you crying?”
“It’s a shack. She lives in a shack,” Pat whispered, mostly to himself.
But Nancy was a resilient woman. She got a job selling perfume at the local department store, aptly named the Fairfield Store, where Missy had worked years prior.
During this time, Nancy still lived a life of excess, even if the house was shabby. There were only brand-name foods to be found in the pantry, nice clothes in the closets, and plenty of pocket change to go around. She knew it wouldn’t last long, though. Uncle Warren was no longer allowing her to borrow from the principal of her trust. She had already nearly depleted it. Selling perfume would not give her the life she had been accustomed to, so she decided to begin nursing school. She had an ability to make people comfortable that lent itself perfectly to being a nurse.
She was a brilliant student. She’d sit on her bed with her books strewn about her, taking copious notes late into the night and often forgetting to eat. She loved learning. Her beautiful handwriting covered countless Five Star college-ruled notebooks.
Nancy still wasn’t drinking, but she was smoking like a chimney and taking various prescription pills, which had been prescribed by the very doctor who’d helped get her sober from alcohol. Whether from stress, alcoholism, or pills, she developed two ulcers on the lining of her intestine. She’d wake up in the middle of the night and stagger to the miniature bathroom, where she’d sit on the closed toilet, doubled over in agony. Andrew and James would wake to the sounds of her moaning. Finally she had the ulcers surgically removed, but the surgery caused her to develop “dumping syndrome,” in which the contents of the stomach empty too quickly into the small intestine, leading to frequent nausea and dizziness.
In 1992, a powerful hurricane flooded Fairfield. The waters of the ocean rose and rose, spilling into the town. Nancy’s home, which was just a stone’s throw away from the beach, was filled nearly to the ceiling with salty seawater. Pete and Robbie, along with the fire department, used a small dinghy to paddle to the house to rescue the dog and the cat. They wept as they waded through the shoulder-high water, dodging Andrew’s baseball cards and Nancy’s school notes, which were soggy and floating on the surface. They found Gus, their golden retriever, and Chloé, their calico cat, perched atop the kitchen counter. Gus and Chloé were best friends, even though they were different species. Gus stood on all fours with his head above the water, and Chloé cowered atop Gus’s shoulder blades, shaking violently from the cold.
The whole house was muddy and waterlogged. Dead fish and long strands of seaweed covered the furniture and beds. The walls were stained with salt and grime. The patio furniture was found floating in the park a few blocks away. Nancy didn’t have home insurance, and this came as a severe financial blow to a woman who was already doing everything she could to ensure her financial stability.
It was all too much. The divorces, the devaluation of the oil stocks, the moves, nursing school, the ulcers, the flood. Nancy wept at her misfortune, from the guest room of Pete’s fiancée’s apartment, where the whole family had gathered for shelter. Heidi, Pete’s fiancée, was in awe of the White/Gil/Whiteside family. They sat together and laughed and told jokes. She thought about this life-defining tragedy—the loss of one’s home—and then looked at the family, who were at that moment hugging and singing along to the Aladdin soundtrack together. Heidi smiled ear to ear and chuckled at the beauty of this strange group of individuals: Pete the pragmatist, Missy the boss, Robbie the jokester musician, Andrew the sweetheart, and James, the silly and gentle youngest son. She thought to herself that Nancy was a brave warrior.
She went to the guest room and knocked lightly on the door. “Nancy? It’s Heidi. Can I come in?” Cracking the door, she saw Nancy sitting on the edge of the bed, holding in one hand a long cigarette, its ashy end long with spent tobacco. Her other arm was folded under her cigarette-arm elbow, and her legs were crossed as she pensively gazed off into space with red, bleary eyes.
“Jesus H. Christ. What the hell am I going to do?”
“Nancy, just come with me. I want you to see this. Just be quiet.”
Heidi led Nancy out of the guest room to the hallway, where she stopped and told her to look around the corner into the kitchen. Nancy’s five children were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking Nestlé’s Quik and laughing hysterically as Robbie reenacted the genie’s lines from Aladdin. James was sitting on his lap and singing along to the music. They were boisterous and full of energy, despite the day’s events.
“They’re so beautiful, Nancy,” Heidi said.
Nancy laughed quietly and then began sobbing. Heidi pulled her into a hug, and they stayed there like that for quite some time.
1988: FOUR YEARS OLD
The first word I learned how to write was mom. I was so proud of my achievement. I always fancied myself a genius, even though I was held back in preschool and had
horrible grades during my time as a student.
I thought, “I’m going to show her what I’ve learned!” I went into my mother’s bedroom and rummaged through her vanity, which was home to multitudinous perfumes, phials filled with bright tinctures, powders, poufs, shadows, lacquers, and lipsticks. I filched a bright-red lipstick in a shiny silver tube and sped off to the den to carry out my task. The den was home to an enormous beige sectional sofa. It was a custom piece of furniture that must have cost a fortune. There was also a behemoth of an ottoman, which I climbed onto. Unscrewing the Lolita-red lipstick, I scrawled the word MOM in enormous letters across the entire surface of the ottoman.
As I was finishing my final, careful stroke, my mother walked in, froze, and screamed at the top of her lungs. “James Bruce! NO!” She snatched me up and the lipstick fell from my hand as she carried me like a football into the large kitchen. I knew exactly where she was going and what she was about to do, but I didn’t know why. Why wasn’t she proud of my achievement?
She plunked me facedown on the counter, whipped my trousers down, reached over to the utensil crock, fished out a large wooden spoon, and began whacking away at my behind ragefully. I cried and screamed, but she didn’t stop. I didn’t know why I was getting the ever-threatened wooden spoon.
Truth is, my siblings and I got the wooden spoon rather often. Our mother was constantly whooping one of us. Perhaps it was barbaric, but you’d better believe I never wrote on any furniture ever again. I don’t condone that sort of abuse, although I don’t feel knowingly damaged by it. But it’s the wounds you can’t see that do the most damage.
Conversely, Pop beat me only once. He had promised me that we would go to the zoo one Saturday and that there would be wolves there. We had piled into the car for the early Saturday AA meeting when it started pouring rain. Pop and Katie looked at each other meaningfully, but I didn’t register their telepathic communication. As usual, I sat on the floor during the meeting, eating the alcoholics’ Oreos and coloring in my books.
When the meeting concluded and the folding chairs were put away, my father steeled himself and told me we weren’t going to the zoo that day; it was far too rainy to be enjoyable. I lost it. I had a nuclear meltdown. I screamed and kicked all the way back to our Bridgeport row house.
When we arrived, they sat me down at the kitchen table and tried to reason with me through my noisy paroxysm. Unfortunately, emotion hears no reason. Fed up, Pop dragged me up the stairs and spanked me into next Tuesday. It was the only time he ever hit me.
After all these years, I remember nothing but the shame of having had such an emotional outburst. I’d forgotten myself. The pain of a spanking was nothing compared with the loathing I felt for myself. Bury the emotions. Bury to protect.
CHAPTER 8
With the help of friends and family, the flooded Barnacle Party House was cleaned and de-molded, and the family moved back in. Nancy would bend but she wouldn’t break. She graduated from nursing school in 1994 with the great distinction of magna cum laude. She was forty-six years old. She had raised five children and been divorced twice. No more would she downgrade herself to support a man.
Nancy found work as a nurse immediately. She worked at two hospitals and various nursing homes before she settled on a private practice, Dr. Donald Gorsuch’s office in Fairfield. She was a wonderful nurse and the patients and staff adored her. She made them feel comfortable and heard, so they weren’t afraid to be vulnerable with her. On one occasion, Dr. Gorsuch even confessed to her that he was having an affair with one of the other nurses. She had that effect on people. She could draw out anything, even one’s deepest secrets. The patients would ask for her by name: “Is Nurse Nancy in today?”
Nancy had a boyfriend for a while, a fellow nurse named Bob. He was a parody of a bachelor, with dyed black hair and a clean-shaven face. He drove a sky-blue 1967 Chevy Impala convertible and owned an absurd home with a twisting indoor koi pond running through its many rooms. Nancy often took Andrew and James to this silly home while she spent time with Bob. She’d give them snacks and plop them down in front of the television. At the time, James had braces and a palate expander, a metal device that affixed to the roof of the mouth and molars for the purpose of barbarically widening his upper jaw.
One day, while James was watching TV at Bob’s and eating a coffee yogurt, which he loved, his palate expander popped open and essentially exploded. Half the metal device lodged in the back of his throat. He spluttered and coughed and cried. Andrew ran to get Nancy and Bob. They took a look inside his mouth and saw shards of metal sticking into his uvula and esophagus. They called an ambulance but there wasn’t time to wait. Bob reluctantly sat James up on his kitchen counter and forcibly cut the palate expander out of his mouth with a heavy pair of wire cutters while tears carved canyons into James’s flushed cheeks. Nancy and Bob split up shortly thereafter. Bob the bachelor was not yet ready to be Bob the stepfather, though Nancy had hoped he would be.
One of Dr. Gorsuch’s patients was a gruff man named Paul and he was an alcoholic. He came to the office to be prescribed a drug called Antabuse, which is said to treat alcoholism by creating a nasty reaction to alcohol: nausea, dizziness, rapid heartbeat, and chest pain. His nurse was none other than the lovely and charismatic Nancy White, no longer a Gil or a Whiteside. They began dating immediately.
Paul was a thin man of medium build with a Rat Pack appeal. His heavy brow sat on top of large blue eyes and a straight, noble nose. He worked as a display coordinator for Home Depot stores across Connecticut and smelled of freshly sawed wood and heated metals. He smoked Marlboro Reds, loved music, and had a sullen, blue-collar mien. He thought Andrew and James were hilarious and befriended them immediately. With the help of Antabuse, Nancy, and counseling, Paul got sober, and he and Nancy were engaged and married within a year.
Nancy, Paul, Andrew, and James moved into Paul’s rental home in a different part of Fairfield. Nancy, having joined the workforce, pooled her money with Paul to demolish and rebuild the Barnacle Party House into a lovely beach house on stilts that would protect it from the frequently rising tides. But during construction, Nancy was diagnosed with toxic shock syndrome, a life-threatening complication of certain types of bacterial infections. Nancy didn’t know exactly how she’d gotten it, but her symptoms were severe. She had a high fever for an extended period and her skin developed bright, angry rashes. Her eyes and throat swelled and reddened. Her hair fell out in patches.
Thanks to Prednisone, a steroid, Nancy conquered the toxic shock syndrome as the last shingles were being put on the new house. The illness had taken many weeks of work and pay away from her, but she was happy to be in her new home with her new husband and her youngest children. She went back to her job at Dr. Gorsuch’s practice. She felt like she was finally making it all work. She was healthy and she had a good job and a home she was proud of. She loved decorating the home in a beachy theme. There were pale blues and greens and large prints of seaside vistas. With all the windows open, you could smell the salty tide drifting on a cool breeze.
1999: FIFTEEN YEARS OLD
Dance had eclipsed everything. I knew I would become a professional. There was no question. I had decided it and therefore it would be, so strong was my delusion and determination.
My mother had remarried. I genuinely liked Paul. He laughed at my jokes and secretly gave me five-dollar bills so I could go to 7-Eleven to get a hot dog and a Slurpee. When we moved back into the newly renovated Reef Road house, Paul gave me a stereo receiver, a five-CD player, and a two-tape deck with two speakers for Christmas. I was overjoyed. It was one of the best gifts I’d ever received. For a teenager, music is often the only way to feel seen and heard.
I was going through a lot. I was struggling with my sexuality and mired in denial. I was doing poorly in school, which I couldn’t care less about, and I had invented a deep and powerful loathing for my father and his strict, structured,
austere household. Nancy spent a lot of effort to negatively influence my view of Pop. She’d spit out vehement diatribes about his shortcomings, calling him all sorts of horrible things. As a naive child, I’d never thought to question them.
Everything confused me. The growing distance between me and my closest brother, Andrew: the two young boys who had played Sonic the Hedgehog with Doritos-stained fingers were long gone. The taunts and jeers of my schoolmates, who didn’t understand my alien mannerisms and speech. The continuous rebellion I felt against my schoolteachers, all of whom I thought were inept and determined to demonize me. The devastating effect of a stillborn child on my stepmother and my father. The blooming relationships with and care from my dance teachers, who felt like a surrogate family. My burgeoning sexuality and experiences, which I didn’t ever want to talk about or confront. And finally, my gravely ill mother, relegated to her sickbed with a mysterious illness.
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