“Does this mean I’m not going away to boarding school?”
Long pause.
Dad’s voice was barely above a whisper. “No, you won’t be going anywhere, Peanut.”
God hadn’t abandoned me altogether.
“We’ll all just try to make the best of the situation. That’s all we can do. Your mother and I, you girls too, we’ll all have to find a way to be civil and give each other a little room to breathe.”
“Room to breathe? This is such bullshit!” Kit’s prospect of living in freedom with Dad was out the window.
Mom hissed. “Katherine, leave the table. Now.”
I knew Mom’s anger wasn’t directed at Kit this time. It was her old anger, exhaust fumes of frustration leaving a contrail of hot vapor polluting the air we would all have to breathe.
*
Our family effort at civility only seemed to make things worse. Kit was home as little as possible and in a foul mood when she was. Dad worked longer hours than ever. Mom was tense, withdrawn. Our only relief came during FD’s visits. Other than that, it was every man for himself. A pall settled over the house.
It was late summer when the news broke. I listened from the back door before walking in. Something was up. Kit, Mom, FD and Dad were in the kitchen. Kit sounded stuffy, like she’d been crying.
“I knew I couldn’t trust you for one minute out of sight. What exactly is your plan…or should I say you and this dirty Mexican?”
“Vivienne—” Dad grimaced.
“For God’s sake, Mom, he’s not a dirty Mexican! He’s from Colombia. His family is rich. They own a huge cattle ranch outside Bogota.”
“Alright. What do you and this boy plan to do about this? Or did you even bother to think about that in the heat of passion?”
Mom caught sight of me. “Go to your room, Clarice. This conversation is not for your ears.”
From my post in the hallway it wasn’t a leap to figure out Kit was pregnant. I made it to the bedroom seconds ahead of her after the conversation came to an abrupt halt. Kit threw the door flying shut, the windows rattling in domino effect from our end of the house to the kitchen.
The scowl was still on her face when she saw me. “You don’t have to pretend you don’t know, Reese.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t turn away from her either.
Kit flopped on the bed and stared at the Marlborough K on the ceiling. “It’s such bullshit. Mom’s just worried about her reputation, what the almighty neighbors will think. Jeeezz, if I’d turned up with leprosy, at least she could say I’d been off in some God-forsaken outpost working as a missionary over the summer. But being pregnant—”
I waited a minute. “What are you gonna do?”
She walked to the bathroom and snapped a wad of toilet paper, the roll still spinning as she dropped on the bed. “I don’t know. Carlos and I haven’t talked about it.” She blew her nose. “Mom is taking me out of school. I’m barely three months, but she says I’ll start showing early because I’m skinny.”
Kit seemed at a loss, her trademark cockiness replaced by uncertainty.
Mom let her stay in school for the next few weeks. She came home with me on the early bus as ordered, silent and sullen the whole way.
At the end of three weeks, Mom withdrew Kit from Saint Monica’s “for health reasons.” Sequestered, she stayed in our room or wandered aimlessly around the backyard. Mom let Jackie come over a few times. Kit wasn’t allowed to see her other friends and was forbidden to talk on the phone.
Jackie told Kit the buzz around school was that she had “the kissing disease”— mononucleosis—which among my sister’s crowd was an illness apparently conferring great status. Mom caught wind of it and was furious, saying Kit had humiliated the family because the kissing disease and pregnancy were conditions on the same spectrum, just a matter of degree. As far as I could tell, half the upperclassmen had contracted mono at some point or other.
Dad and I rallied around my sister. Two days a week, he ducked out early from work and drove Kit to Sunset Beach so she could get out of the house for an hour. They would walk along the deserted shore until it was time to come home for dinner. On weekends they reversed the routine and walked early in the morning before anyone was out, even surfers.
I jumped on board too as Kit’s errand girl, sneaking around Mom and riding my bike to Pronto Market. Her reserve babysitting money that used to go for cigarettes was now earmarked for candy bars and movie magazines.
On weekends, Carlos visited. Soft spoken and intelligent, he had moved to the U.S. to live with his uncle in Santa Monica. The plan had been for him to get into a good college and study architecture before returning to Colombia. That plan was out the window now.
Dad and I both liked Carlos. As for Mom, it wouldn’t have mattered how nice he was, she would never have approved of him, which is probably what drew my sister to him in the first place.
My sister wasn’t the first girl to get pregnant in high school. St. Monica’s seemed to have one of those girls once a year, girls who would drop out of sight and return a year later after traveling to Europe. At school we giggled about going to Europe being code for being knocked up. Now it was happening in our family, and no one was giggling.
There was no way Mom would let Kit go away to a home for unwed mothers and have the baby, give it up for adoption, which the Catholic church would’ve sanctioned. It wasn’t about that. How would she explain such an absence to the neighbors, much less her fellow parishioners? She would be mortified once gossip took hold. That was not going to happen. Mom understood the cost and necessity of ruthlessness.
In an unlikely turn of events, Kit had leap-frogged over me as Mom’s front-running liability. Sending her daughter to South America was a perfect solution, much better than boarding school in Arizona had been for me. Mom hadn’t engineered Kit’s exit, but she forced it into action.
The clock was ticking. Mom pressed Kit and Carlos for specifics on their plan. One Saturday, Kit beside him, Carlos sat in the kitchen and talked to Mom and Dad like a real grown up. He described the plan in detail. His mother had sent money for the plane fare. He and Kit were leaving for Bogota and would live with her.
From the hallway where I listened, the words hit like a sledge hammer. I didn’t hear anything after the part about moving to Bogota. My bet was Kit didn’t either, though she sat two feet away.
My sister would be free of Mom at last, only not in the way she had planned.
It was Friday evening, three hours before FD was due to walk through the door for The Twilight Zone. These days Kit stayed in the bedroom until he showed up. Tonight I waited with her.
The bedroom floor was littered with scraps of paper as I sat cutting out pictures of Troy Donahue from the old movie magazines Kit had given me. She was lying on her bed, staring at the big Marlborough K in a Zen state of meditation. That was an improvement over the forlorn expression totally foreign to all of us.
“I wonder if they'll have The Twilight Zone in Bogata,” I said, trying to cheer her up.
She scoffed. “They probably won't even have TV.”
“I thought his family was rich.”
“They are, but Carlos said they don't have everything in Colombia that we have here.”
“Well they must have TV,” I said, unable to comprehend any home that didn’t in 1963.
Kit clicked her tongue. “Even if they do, everything will be in Spanish.”
“Oh yeah.” I kept forgetting not everyone in the world spoke English. “I bet you learn Spanish real fast.”
Kit brought both hands up and covered her face. She held perfectly still, as if she could hold back the tears. Her shoulders started shaking, confirming she couldn't.
“You’ll be with Carlos, that’s the important part,” I said. Kit’s crying cast my sister in a whole new light. For one brief moment, she was a scared little girl. I ached to hug her.
Her moment of vulnerability passed. Kit sat up abruptly, w
iping her hand across her face in a rough slap.” I don't want to be with Carlos. I don’t want to learn Spanish. I don't want to go to Colombia, and I sure as heck don't want this baby.”
“Kit…you don't mean that.” It was as much a question as a statement.
“I don't know what I mean. It's all such a mess. I just wish I could have my old life back.”
“Yeah.” I was going to say more. A wave of emotion held me back. Kit, leaving this house. Until this very moment, it hadn’t seemed real. Mom and Dad’s sending me away to boarding school had turned out not to be real, just a sickening threat hanging over my head. A scare was one thing. This was reality. Unlike Mom and Dad changing their minds, Kit’s fate was out of her hands. The baby was real. My sister would be leaving.
I waited for the feeling to subside. “It'll be weird not having you here anymore.”
“Lucky you,” she said. “You get the bedroom to yourself and—” She didn't finish. I could hear the strain in her voice as she tried to sound matter-of-fact. “I guess you can keep my record collection and purses. I was going to give all my good stuff to Jackie, but—” This time her voice broke. She waited a moment. “You might as well have it…I’ll never see Jackie again.”
“I can? Really?” I toned down my excitement. “I'll take good care of everything. When you come to visit, you can have it all back.”
“Colombia is a long way away. South America’s a whole different continent. It doesn't seem likely I'll be coming back anytime soon.”
Leaving was one thing. It had never occurred to me that I might not see my sister again.
I jumped up and rummaged through the closet for my shoe box of treasures. “Here.” I turned to Kit and opened my hand. “I have fifty-two dollars saved up. It's yours. You can buy a new purse and records in Bogota.”
Kit stared at the money for what seemed like a long time. I felt stupid, standing there with my hand out, waiting for her to ask what I thought she could buy with fifty-two measly dollars.
I barely felt it and she might have just been holding it to take the money, but I think she squeezed my hand.
Kit and Carlos were married in a civil ceremony at the courthouse in downtown Los Angeles. That same afternoon, they left for Colombia.
Just like that, my sister’s tumultuous tenure in the Cavanaugh household had come to an end.
*
Two weeks after Kit left our family problems fell to the wayside, at least for a few days.
I dropped my bike outside Pronto Market and fished in my pocket for the quarter Mom had given me to buy cigarettes. Something felt strange the moment I walked inside. Sam hovered over a radio at the counter along with several customers. They were straining to hear through the static and looked terribly upset.
I edged my way to Sam. He squeezed my arm and kept his focus to the radio. A woman cried out. A collective gasp went through the group.
President Kennedy was dead.
I pedaled home as fast as my legs would go. Dad’s words rang in my ear. There won’t be a nuclear attack, Peanut. President Kennedy won’t let things go that far with the Russians. The President is dead. He can’t stop the Russians now. We don’t have shelter. Greg. Greg and Stephanie. My mind was a jumble of tangled thoughts.
I burst through the door, flushed and breathless. “MOM!”
We nearly collided in the hallway. Her irritation turned to concern at the news.
“Are the Russians going to bomb us?”
“No…no, of course not. Calm down, Clarice.”
I was too distraught to savor the affection of her taking my hand in hers. She led me into the living room and turned on the TV. We sat on the edge of the couch and watched.
Walter Cronkite’s face filled the screen. President Kennedy died an hour ago of a gunshot wound to the head. Mr. Cronkite sounded tense, not at all as he did on the six o’clock news. It seemed no one knew exactly what had happened. He kept saying, “This just in—”
The TV stayed on through dinner. Mom made sandwiches and brought them to the living room on trays. Dad filled her in every time she was out of earshot. Dallas, Texas. The President had been shot while riding with The First Lady in a motorcade.
I had never seen my parents look scared of anything. They looked scared now.
Mom phoned the rectory every fifteen minutes. No one answered. On the fourth try the housekeeper picked up. FD was at the Church consoling parishioners who had gathered to grieve and pray for the President’s family.
The weekend of November 22, 1963 crawled forward in a haze of patchy information and anxiety. Our TV stayed on whenever the news broadcast. A pall settled over the house, the neighborhood, and as I would learn later, the world. Shock and grief filled the airwaves, burned in the eyes and on the faces of every person we talked to or didn’t. Uncertainty hung in the air.
I remembered as a kid thinking on any given day that the world would forever be as it was in that moment, because I was incapable of imagining it any other way. On that dark November day, I imagined the world as very different from the one I lived in today.
The fear radiating from my parents in the aftermath of President Kennedy’s assassination shook me to the core. Family discord didn’t matter. Nothing did. A nuclear bomb was going to wipe us off the face of the earth.
Only those with a shelter would survive.
The world was no longer safe, inside or outside my family.
At least if I was going to die, the secret was going to die with me.
*
Looking back on that year, it seems all the lines between right and wrong had blurred, our familiar landscape rearranged. Instead of the tension Kit managed to generate on a daily basis, a haunted atmosphere filled the house. That was the thing about Kit—everyone was defined by their catalytic reaction to her. The emptiness brought by Kit’s absence threw me, Mom and Dad off kilter. It felt like the fourth leg of our table had broken and we were scrambling to regain balance with the remaining three. We had lost the one thing tacitly uniting us—the shared experience of surviving the tempest that was my sister.
Mom wanted all trace of Kit removed, even the family photos in the living room. She packed up the stuff from our bedroom and insisted Dad put it somewhere in the garage out of sight. He needed our tallest ladder to place the four boxes labeled with Kit’s name high on a shelf behind the old camping gear.
There was nothing to be done except continue our family charade. Mom concocted a cover story for neighbors and parishioners that took on a life of its own. Kit had been accepted into an exclusive program abroad in cultural studies. Mom hadn’t mentioned it before in case Kit hadn’t been accepted. That’s how elite it was. The high-spirited rebellion people might have seen in her daughter was borne of suppressing a keen intelligence. Kit clearly needed more than had been offered by a small private school in a provincial town.
Dad and I marveled at the stories Mom fabricated and wondered after a few weeks if she hadn’t started believing them herself. Every Sunday after Mass, Mom would recount some exotic episode in Kit’s travels. How exciting, the women would say, how proud you must feel. Kit is a fortunate girl indeed to have parents who understand the educational value of experiencing other cultures, parents who allow the girl to travel the world on her own with a group of strangers.
On the drive home from church, Mom would show not a shred of chagrin. Oblivious to the fact me and Dad had heard the pack of lies, she would bask in the glow of superiority over women who envied her for having such a daughter.
Dad didn’t dare say anything, gob smacked though he was by her hubris. This aspect of Mom was no surprise to me. My mother was expert at creating a whole different world to ease the pain of disappointment in the real one. First she had become Maria the nun-turned-governess in The Sound of Music, followed by her marriage to FD, though that role may have preceded the other, and now she was the proud mother of a daughter accepted into an elite program of study in Europe.
I wondered if Mom
had any idea how transparent she was spinning fantasies built on the ruins of her own dreams.
*
A letter arrived from Kit in December. I had just walked in the back door from school. Mom gave me the nonverbal cue to disappear after a quick hello to FD. The letter was on the kitchen table, addressed to me. The raised eyebrow from Mom made it clear she didn’t approve of Kit’s writing to me rather than to her and Dad.
November 28, 1963
Dear Reese,
Greetings from South America! I’ve gotten settled in Aida’s house, Carlos’s mom’s house where we’ll live from now on. So far everyone has been really nice to me. It’s a good thing too. Carlos is with his dad on the ranch all week while I’m stuck here.
I’m already going crazy with boredom, doing nothing but eat, eat, eat. The baby won’t be here for another four months. By then I won’t fit through the door. It’s a good thing the house is so big…7 bedrooms and 10 bathrooms, not counting the servants’ quarters. I have my own maid, Rosa, who makes my bed, does my laundry, everything! Mom would love it here…she could wear a long poufy gown and pretend to be Scarlett O’Hara.
There isn’t a thing to do. Aida and her sisters, who live around the corner, play cards and drink all day. It’s a household of women during the week, going from one sister’s house to the other. At least they’re all excited about the baby. Everything is baby, baby, baby. I feel like a celebrity the way they fuss over me.
I’ve hardly even been into town. The servants do the shopping and women don’t go out unescorted by a man anyway. It’s pretty stupid. The last two weekends Carlos and I have gone to the movies but everything is in Spanish so even the movies aren’t much fun. Carlos says after the baby comes, he’ll take me horseback riding. That’ll be so bitchin’!
I hope Mom isn’t giving you hell without me to pick on. If she even cares, you can tell her I’m fine. Be sure to mention I have my own maid.
Give Dad my love. I miss him terribly.
Kit
I tucked the tissue-thin letter into my shoe box at the bottom of the closet. At dinner I told Mom exactly what Kit had instructed me to say and watched her face tighten at mention of the maid.
The Road at My Door Page 8
