How to Cook Your Daughter

by Jessica Hendra

  Life is not always what you want it to be…and that was true. It wasn’t. But I hadn’t had a choice, I thought. Not when I was seven. Not when he crawled into bed with me. Not when he pushed my head down and told me what to do.

  I said nothing for the rest of that long walk. I just thought about what he said. I had never compared my pain to that of others. And he was right. Others had suffered worse. But he was simply trying to evade the most important issue—taking responsibility for what he had done. And until he did that, until he took responsibility, I could never feel that what happened wasn’t my fault. Until I stopped blaming myself, I couldn’t stop being ashamed. He had used the night to craft his response. I suspect he was proud of what he came up with.

  I headed back to London feeling worse than when I arrived at Celia’s. I hated myself, not only for what had happened with my dad, but also because I couldn’t get over it. I felt weak and stupid, just as Dad told me I would. Bulimia took over my life. I loved school and acting, but there were days when I gave up, “bad” days when I would walk up to Hampstead High Street and buy pastries and chocolates. I took them home to my small room in a new flat I shared with some girlfriends, locked the door, and sat in bed eating and eating and eating. Then I would cry over the empty wrappers and bags until my regret pushed me into the bathroom to throw it all up.

  To make matters worse, I worked part-time at a tea house in Hampstead—a shop filled with creamy éclairs, croissants, homemade cakes, and other delights. Putting a bulimic behind the pastry counter was like leaving a Vicodin addict in charge of the pharmacy. Often, the temptations overwhelmed me. My finger might skim the icing off a cake I was wrapping for a customer. Or I might pilfer a cookie when the boss wasn’t looking. I sometimes ate crumbs off the floor. And on quite a few occasions, I rummaged through the large garbage bins in the back of the shop, cramming the half-eaten scraps of a patron’s chocolate gâteau into my mouth. I hated myself for doing it, but I was used to hating myself by then. Instead of using the employee bathroom for purging, I’d simply wait until I got home. That way, I could have all the time I needed with my head over the toilet and my finger down my throat.

  I gave up on resolutions; I knew I would never live up to them anyway. Most days I thought I would rather be dead, but I didn’t have the guts to follow through.

  Now and then I had a “good” day when I managed to resist bingeing, but they were few. Pablo and I talked on the phone from wherever he was. I wondered if things would be better if we were together. But I knew he wouldn’t be able to help me. I had already told him years ago about what my father had done. He seemed shocked and confused. He had always been enamored of Tony Hendra. “How am I supposed to treat your dad knowing this?” he asked me. I certainly had no answers. After all, I didn’t even know how to treat my father. In the end, Pablo behaved as though no such thing had happened.

  When Pablo and I were apart, he dated other women and I dated other guys—a Tango superstar visiting from Argentina who wore white linen suits and spoke no English; a nice Jewish premed from Yale who was working in London for a year, a cockney boxer, a musical prodigy three years younger who asked me to be his “first” (why not?) and, a motorcycle rider who turned out to be a coke head. By the summer, I was fooling around with an older married man. I met him in the North London wine bar where I waitressed. He wanted to set me up in my own “mistress flat” and would pay the rent and put me through school. In the diary I kept, I debated taking him up on his offer:

  It’s hard to be moral in the traditional sense when one of the greatest moral taboos, incest, has been part of your life. Maybe I am so immoral because I have to find a way to accept what happened to me, to normalize it. I can’t normalize it if I make everything into “morals.” Also, what’s the big deal about marriage? Everything seems so secondary in the face of incest, a much more horrible and confusing sin than infidelity. Growing up in such a fucked up household has made me a complex person morally. In one sense I feel guilty about everything; in another I have no strict sense of morality as such. My father transgressed every boundary of morality; why shouldn’t I do the same? Why shouldn’t I get my own back on morality and treat people with the same lack of morals as I was treated? Why be the victim? Why not victimize other people? All these feelings though are ugly feelings because they come from anger. Anger that I was fooled, that I went along with it, that no one told me what it was about or what would happen to me.

  I ended up sleeping with Steve. The next morning, after he had already left, his wife called. She was looking for her husband. She said she found my number on a matchbook and asked me to leave him alone. They had a little girl. She didn’t sound angry, just desperate. I got the feeling it wasn’t the first such call she had made, and I thought of my mother and my father’s many mistresses. I promised Steve’s wife that I wouldn’t see her husband again. As it was, he never called me after I gave in to his requests to spend the night. Gone were the flat and the school tuition, even if I had decided to take them. He avoided the wine bar, and in a fit of anger, I tried to pawn the Rolex he had left by my bed. The tough-looking pawn-shop owner laughed when I asked him what it was worth. It turned out to be a fake.

  I had to get out of London. The pattern of my life had become so self-destructive that I knew it was time to leave. I had made friends and contacts in the two years at Central, and, because I had British citizenship through my parents, I could work in London. But I began to feel as though I were on such a downhill slide that getting away was the only thing that might help. I was too poor to see a private shrink, but I did attempt to see someone through England’s National Heath System. The receptionist told me politely that it could take up to three months for me to get an appointment. If I waited three months, I might be under a double-decker bus.

  To save on rent, I had left my flat and squatted, with permission, in a house in Ladbroke Grove that an old family friend, the comedian John Cleese, was renovating. My mattress lay on the floor of an upstairs room, and the half-demolished kitchen had a working stove. In the dusty living room, surrounded by planks of wood and nails, sat a baby grand piano. It was the only piece in the room. Each morning, I would come down to find workmen tearing apart more and more of the house. I don’t know what they thought of me in my white robe, making tea, surrounded by total destruction. At one point the house had no back walls and stood open to the London rainstorms. I didn’t care. It had a roof (most of the time, anyway), and it was free.

  Mine was not an unusual lifestyle for students at my school. In fact, I knew quite a few kids who “slept rough” as they called it, spending nights on park benches or in squats. I thought one boy must be well off because he had a car. Then I realized he lived in it. But all of us took a certain pride in the poverty of student life. We were still young enough to think that being poor was glamorous. One roguishly handsome, gifted actor carried his toothbrush, not a silk handkerchief, in the top pocket of his jacket. “You never know where you might spend the night,” he explained with a wink.

  I was feeling poor but not glamorous. Disgusting, really. It wasn’t so much my surroundings but the constant battles with myself. I made a desperate call to Pablo, who was in Madrid. “Please come get me,” I begged. He said he still loved me, but our on-again, off-again relationship—and my emotional crises—were too much for him. I could come to Spain. He would be happy to see me, he said. But he wasn’t coming to England.

  A few days later, I packed and headed to Paris and then to Madrid. My mother was now living with a war photographer—a man who would become her second husband. Conveniently, he had a loft in the same building as ours. She planned to meet me in Spain, and we would go back to New York together. Pablo and I spent a few weeks traveling. We saw a Romanesque church in a small Andalusian village where we thought we might have our wedding. But I could tell we both had our doubts about whether that day would ever come. My mom joined us. Then, with the usual anxiety, I got on the plane to New York. It was good to
be back, but I found that I hadn’t left my problems in England.

  I was once again in the same city as my father. I saw him and Carla, but I didn’t dare raise what we had talked about at Celia’s—and, of course, neither did he. I got a restaurant job, a few theater gigs, and made new resolutions about my bulimia. I started running every day and, though that didn’t solve my eating problems, it seemed to help. Running became a way of escaping, of being in control if only for an hour or two. When I ran, I felt like a machine, freed of the guilt and self-loathing. I began to live for the early mornings.

  I’d get up early, well before Mom, and head to the kitchen of the loft to make a cup of coffee that was strong enough to give me a mild heart attack. I’d down it fast, and tie my running shoes. Then I’d race down the familiar dusty stairwell of Twenty-five East Fourth Street, out the front door and into the usually freezing wind that came off Broadway and blew down the street. Rain might hit me in the face. The potholes might turn to miniature ice rinks. Snow, yellowed by dogs, might pile in heaps along on the curbs. But I would run. In me, my father’s addictive personality came out not in a drug-and-drinking habit but in this solitary passion. One of my favorite routes was down Lafayette Street toward the Brooklyn Bridge. I ran through Chinatown, skirting delivery men as they unloaded heaps of bok choy and red cabbages from the trucks double parked in front of Chinese grocery stores. On to TriBeca, where hung-over kids emerged from the clubs I used to go to myself. Past the all-night diner on Canal Street, where Krisztina and I had often gone to smoke and drink coffee at four in the morning. I ran through the weekend emptiness of the streets around City Hall until I made it to the bridge and up the wooden steps to the walkway that led to Brooklyn. The planks clattered under my feet, and the wind off the river was often so strong that it would blow me back toward Manhattan. I loved looking up at the spider web of cables that supported the bridge. When I got to Brooklyn, I turned around and faced the Manhattan skyline.

  Other days, I headed uptown for a different scene. Along Madison Avenue, I ran amazed by the fur coats and high-heeled boots the Upper East Side ladies wore just to get their morning coffee or walk their tiny, yapping dogs. I crossed Fifth Avenue and followed it past the Metropolitan Museum of Art and into Central Park, where I joined other puffing, sweating New Yorkers as we casually tried to outpace each other along the six-mile route.

  No matter where I went, I ran for miles, and I loved my dirty, worn out shoes, loved the feeling of pounding the pavements. I wasn’t fast or graceful, but I was dedicated and obsessive. And I didn’t feel ashamed about this.

  I began traveling for regional theater, to Philadelphia, New England, Florida, wherever I could make a few bucks acting and get a shitty place to stay free. I actually liked going to different places and meeting a new cast. I felt hopeful whenever I stepped off a train (I refused to fly) or a bus in some place I didn’t know—and some place that didn’t know me. But my habits traveled alongside.

  I was thrilled to be cast in a play at The Williamstown Theatre Festival in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. A few years before, when I was about twenty-five, I did my first play there. Mel Gussow from the New York Times came to review it, and I was delighted when he gave me a good mention. I met my dad in a bar in New York on my day off. He never came to see one of my shows at Williamstown, but then I’m sure he was busy. I showed him the review and pointed to my name and the positive line about my acting. He nodded and didn’t seem at all surprised. “I know Mel very well,” he said of the reviewer. “I’m sure he recognized your last name.”

  Williamstown was a summer stock for stars. The 1992 main stage production featured Linda Pearl and Michael York in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. The Waiting Room, for which I was cast, was being done in Williamstown’s more experimental second stage. The play took place in different time periods, and I played a Victorian woman who had nervous ticks and was subject to fits of hysteria. It wasn’t a stretch. Another character was a Chinese woman whose feet had been bound so tightly they were mush. Actor Kurt Fuller played a big-time, modern-day businessman making dirty money in pharmaceuticals. The plot centered on a woman with breast cancer. It was a comedy.

  I was nervous on the day of the first rehearsal. The rest of the cast had been flown in from L.A. and had already performed the play with great success. Only my part had been recast. The other actors had much longer résumés than mine. And almost everyone at the festival recognized Kurt from the movies he’d been in—Wayne’s World, for one. When I walked into rehearsal, I had no idea who he was. I was from NoHo. I didn’t go to see big Hollywood movies, though I had seen my father in Spinal Tap. I was used to the hole-in-the-wall theater spaces on Avenue A and sitting through intermission-less productions of King Lear in which the actors outnumbered the audience. I went to independent film festivals at the Angelika Film Center on Houston Street. I read a lot of subtitles.

  But I was struck by Kurt nonetheless. He was so tall—all long legs and arms and huge green eyes. Twelve years older than me, he was balding but handsome. Charismatic. And funny, funny, funny. Self-deprecating and yet confident. Witty and sarcastic but still kind. That impressed me. Shocked me even. Funny people were not, in my experience, kind.

  On that first day of rehearsal, Kurt was the only cast member who made a point of introducing himself. He seemed to understand how awkward I felt being the new girl. As he told me later, he also had fallen in love with me.

  11.

  SONG OF SOLOMON

  AS REHEARSALS CONTINUED, WE SPENT MORE TIME together backstage. Kurt declined the festival’s minimal housing (a bedroom and bathroom with a very shared kitchen) and rented a house on the town’s golf course. He said he came to Williamstown more for the golf than for the theater. One day, he brought to rehearsal a Victoria’s Secret catalog that had been sent to his rental house. During our off-stage time, he began reading it aloud to me in a sort of mocking announcer’s voice.

  “The bra top—our original sexy basic with very secret support. The genius is in what you can’t see. Hidden bralette shaping for comfort. Our cleavage-enhancing padded push-up tops have removable pads and underwire cups. Be your best shape ever….”

  Given that I played a Victorian woman, I wore a corset, and I giggled so much that the laces started to pop. This only made us both laugh harder. I doubled up in hysterics and the whole corset ripped up the back. After that, the wardrobe woman forbade Kurt to bring in any more catalogs. Seriously.

  Despite what I now see was heavy-duty flirting, it never occurred to me then that Kurt was attracted to me. It didn’t seem odd that he would miraculously turn up at the gym when I was working out, happen to eat at the same restaurant, or even stroll into the post office when I was buying stamps. I rode a bike all over town (being a city kid, I had never learned to drive), and I had no idea that Kurt was scouting the town for my chained-up, bright blue ten-speed.

  A few days before the play was to open, I arrived at the theater to find that a large, gold bike with a very high seat had been locked next to the spot where I parked mine.

  I went into the theater and peeked into the men’s dressing room.

  “Hey, you got a bike,” I said to Kurt.

  “I got it yesterday. It seems like the best way to get around.”

  “It is,” I said, as though I had converted him. “I’m thinking about going for a ride this afternoon. There’s supposed to be a really nice lake about ten miles away. Do you want to come?”

  “Sure,” he said, “but are there any dogs?”

  “Any dogs? I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t think there are packs of wild dogs roaming around Williamstown, Massachusetts, if that’s what you’re asking.” I chuckled. Kurt didn’t.

  “No. What I’m asking, smart ass, is if there are any dogs that are going to run out of their houses, come barking across their lawns, and bite me in the leg while I’m trying to ride away.” He said it in a sardonic, self-deprecating way. “That’s what
I’m asking, because in case you haven’t noticed, Jessica, I am a tall man. I have a long way down to the ground. I don’t need some mutt chasing after me because it can’t tell a bike from a live animal. So I’m asking, are there any dogs?”

  “I don’t know, Kurt.” I smiled. “But I’ll protect you.”

  He returned the smile. “Very good then. Perfect. You ride in front, and we’ll do fine.”

  After rehearsal, Kurt and I climbed on our bikes and rode off down the tree-lined roads of western Massachusetts. We didn’t see any dogs, but there were a lot of cows. And green fields full of hay. And tall maples and oaks. And sunshine, red barns, and chickens. We never found the lake, but it didn’t matter.

  After a few miles, we stopped at a general store to get drinks. I made Kurt stay outside while I went in. I told him he was so drenched in sweat that I was afraid the store-owner might get scared and call the paramedics. He laughed and sat down in the grass to battle the gnats.

  While we drank Diet Cokes, I told Kurt about Pablo, how our long distance relationship had gone on for years, and also about John, whom I was seeing in New York but whom I knew was too young for me. Kurt asked if both of them had a lot of hair. Then Kurt told me about the woman he was living with in California. She had just broken off their engagement for the third time. Eventually the cool of the late afternoon got us back on our bikes, and at the corner of Main Street and some lane named for a tree, it was time for us to part.

  “Thanks for coming,” I said.

  “Thanks for asking me,” Kurt answered.

  There was an awkward moment. Should I give him a kiss on the cheek? A hug? I considered more but assumed we were just friends and opted for the hug. “Bye,” I waved, and rode off thinking what a nice afternoon we had had.