“He lost Jeanne and his wife blamed him for it,” I say. “It makes sense that he was so overprotective.”
“I know,” she says. “I just hated being the bad guy.”
FIVE
To describe my dad accurately may mean displaying his flaws. To describe my dad fairly, the motivations beneath his flaws should be shown.
Because he lost a daughter, he became an overprotective father.
Because his first wife cheated on him, he became a jealous husband.
His motivations cancel his flaws, I reason.
Am I displaying my flaws enough?
After I learned about my dead namesake, I became a perfectionist—competitive with Jeanne, without fully, consciously, recognizing my motivation. I wanted to be good because I wanted to be as good as Jeanne.
I worry I’m shaping my childhood inaccurately, fabricating my feelings because of some need for conflict and character motivation. That by selecting a majority of Jeanne-related scenes I’m somehow ignoring the bulk of my childhood. That, and I worry I’m too easily swayed by the sonic impact of a line. “I tried not to hear her name when he said my own”—that sounds nice but it seems wrong. Or maybe I’m digging up feelings I tried to ignore. I worry by pulling Jeanne into the prose, I’m ruining my promise to my dad. The thought that Jeanne bothered me would destroy him.
I promised him a book, but not this book.
MOM
“You were a perfectionist for as long as I can remember,” my mom says after I call and share my theory—that Jeanne possibly is why I worked so hard. “In preschool, you got so mad that you couldn’t tie your shoes. You sat in the living room for hours—I’m not kidding—practicing. Your dad and I told you not to worry, to try again tomorrow, but you wouldn’t listen. You were stubborn, like him. A perfectionist, like him. You sat there trying until you got it right. You didn’t get that from me, that’s for sure. This one time you even told us to ground you—for what I don’t even remember. You were in kindergarten or first grade. Your dad and I were so confused.”
DAD
My aunt Anna died in a car accident when I was in junior high. First his daughter, now his sister, I remember thinking.
“She didn’t know what she was doing,” my mom explained. “She grabbed the wheel from your uncle.”
Anna had suffered from Alzheimer’s. My uncle Tony survived, but he lost his arm, or maybe both arms.
Until I was in the third grade, she and Tony visited every year. She played dolls with me. Tony tap-danced with me. They stopped visiting, I later learned, because he was trying to hide Anna’s Alzheimer’s. We kept in touch by phone and mail. They sent gifts on holidays and birthdays: a small doll from Sicily, colorful barrettes, old coins.
The funeral would be in New York.
Arlene worked for the airlines. She arranged for my dad’s plane ticket. My mom said that she and I would stay in Ohio while he attended the funeral. I didn’t ask why. I assumed it was because his other daughters didn’t want me there.
On the drive to the airport, I asked my dad if he could bring a parachute with him. I’d never flown before.
“People fly in planes every day,” my mom assured me.
As we walked through the airport, I kept looking up at my dad. He promised to call when he reached New York.
As he disappeared into a long hallway, I ran to a big window and stared at the plane that would carry him away.
MOM
My dad didn’t like returning to New York. Would it be more accurate to end that sentence with “not after living in Ohio” or “not after losing Jeanne”?
“This one time,” my mom tells me, “we were driving to New York to visit. You weren’t born yet. Six hours into the drive, your father started to panic. His hands were shaking. ‘I don’t want to go,’ he said. I told him, ‘We don’t have to.’ So we turned around and drove back to Ohio.”
Another time, he could have returned to New York to collect settlement money for his throat cancer. Almost everyone who painted warships with him developed lung or throat cancer.
“He would’ve had to show up in New York to collect the money,” my mom says. “His brother, Frank, had called him, tried to get him to come for the money—thousands of dollars. Your dad would have had to bring proof or talk with someone about the cancer. I can’t remember. But he didn’t want to go, and I told him he didn’t have to. He pointed out that he’d smoked for fifty years. He quit smoking when you were born, just like that. He said, ‘Who’s to say I didn’t get the throat cancer from smoking?’ I told him, ‘If you don’t want to go, you don’t have to. If it upsets you, the money isn’t worth it.’”
DAD
When I was in junior high, he sold a car we had. It stalled at random times. Two teenage boys wanted it. They worked on cars. “I only want you to pay me for the price of the tires,” my dad told them. “Those are brand-new tires. But you have to promise me you won’t drive it. Use it for any parts that are still good.”
He must have been thinking of Jeanne.
MENTAL ILLNESS
In junior high, I volunteered as a candy striper at the local hospital. I changed patients’ sheets. I brought clean towels and mail. For patients with no visitors and no mail, I brought flowers and unsigned notes that read: “Feel better,” “Thinking of you,” and so on. Most patients were my dad’s age, but he was still healthy. He could still garden and build things, like rose arches and birdhouses.
“You loved volunteering at that hospital,” my mom says. “Your dad would drive you there, come back, and tell me how proud he was of you.”
Some evenings I volunteered at the hospital’s main desk, answering phone calls and sorting mail. Any mail to the psychiatric ward was to be put aside. Its patients could be dangerous, my boss explained. The other candy stripers called them “lunatics” and “crazies” who claimed to hear voices and see visions. I thought about the saints I studied in school. I thought about the voice and hurried thoughts on my stairway. What separated a saint from someone mad?
•
I’m not sure why, but I decided to hand-deliver mail to the psychiatric ward. I waited until its doors opened for a doctor ahead of me, and then I slipped in after. The ward looked enormous. A piano, couches, and card tables were on one side. The nurses’ station was in the middle. And on the other side was a hallway of closed doors. The patients mostly resembled people in my town. Several played cards. Others surrounded a small television set. But there was one patient, seated by herself, her eyes fixed on the middle distance.
A nurse ran to me.
“You’re not supposed to be here.”
I apologized and handed her the envelopes.
I tried to open the doors, but she said she needed to do that.
I looked back at the empty gaze before I left. I could tell there was something wrong.
JEANNE
“Jeannie, they called your name.”
I was sitting in the bleachers of a school gym several towns away. Hundreds of other junior high students from throughout Ohio were clapping. We were there for a state writing competition. My English teacher told me to stand.
I looked around, confused. The cuts on my forearms itched against my peach sweater. No one knew about the cuts. My teacher repeated for me to stand.
“You won first place,” she said.
I won on the basis of three stories written that same day in timed sessions. The only story I remember: Three girls stand in line for a movie that they have no intention of seeing. They want to be seen. They choose to stand next to a movie poster that shows a car crashed into a tree. Two of them chew gum and talk about boys. The other girl is thinking about her sister who died in a car accident. “Anne wants to lose herself in a movie” is the only sentence I remember. Her sister’s name was Annie. I titled the story “i.” Nothing much happened beyond that.
As an adult handed me a trophy, I told myself Jeanne won.
SIX
In the story, the i
appeared in the dead sister’s name. But I could be misremembering. If I am misremembering, then my mistake implies that I want, or wanted, to trade places with Jeanne. But that doesn’t feel right.
Also, I packed the thought I told myself Jeanne won into my memory because it seems like it belongs there, but honestly I don’t know if it belongs there. I remember my itchy peach sweater, the applause, the classmates who congratulated me and the classmates who didn’t. But I don’t have the folder of stories that transformed into a trophy, and I don’t have the trophy. Later I received an A- in a science class (I think it was science), and threw away my awards.
Jeanne wasn’t always on my mind. I knew my dad loved me. I don’t want to imply that Jeanne occupied my whole life. I did things without thinking of her.
Such as?
I need to address that.
I worry that Jeanne and my feelings about Jeanne are entering memories where they never were. I’m tempted to remove her.
I’m also tempted to empty my childhood and adolescence of any signs of sadness or mental illness: the wrist scratching, the foot cutting, the overwhelming speed of thoughts that left me dizzy, the occasional voices. And then how after my dad died they turned angry.
Maybe my grief, or illness, was planted before he died.
My classmates often reminded me, “Your dad is going to die.”
And Jeanne died.
Preemptive grieving—is that a thing?
DAD
My friends no longer felt like my friends. They told me to study less because boys don’t like to feel inferior to girls. They told me I should get a nose job. I begged my parents to transfer me out of Catholic school. I decided that feeling like an outsider and being told I’m ugly were not persuasive enough arguments. So I made a list of all the other reasons I hated Catholic school: the math teacher taught more religion than math; some of the boys raised their arms like they were Nazis during the Pledge of Allegiance and the teachers never punished them; one of the nuns asked us to scratch her back during movies. My mom said the public school was in the news practically every day because of drugs.
“That’s because the Catholic school doesn’t have to report crimes,” I told her. “You think Catholic kids don’t do drugs?”
“The public school has a metal detector,” she said, probably shouted.
“Isn’t a metal detector a good thing?” I asked, probably shouted.
My dad played the more sensible role—in front of me, at least. He and I visited the public school, spoke with a guidance counselor and the principal, observed an English honors class. Impressed, he helped present my case to my mom. What convinced her was a simple detail.
“A kid with green hair held open the door for me,” he told her. “Not once, in all the years Jeannie went to Catholic school, did a kid hold open a door for me.”
JEANNE
It was my first day of high school. No one at the public school knew me. During attendance, teachers called me Barbara, and each time I asked that they call me Jeannie.
“Why Jeannie?” one of them asked.
“It’s a long story,” I said.
“J-E-A-N-N-E?” another asked.
“There’s an i,” I said.
DAD
I founded and edited the school newspaper. My GPA ranked above a 4.0. I was president of several clubs.
But I spent less and less time with my dad, who no longer could climb the stairs. Now he and my mom slept on the foldout sofa in the living room.
My friends thought I was lucky: the entire second floor to myself.
But I didn’t like it. When I was a girl, my bed mirrored my parents’ bed—separated by a wall. If I couldn’t sleep, I’d knock three times on the wall, and my dad would knock back.
JEANNE
A black-and-white video played on an old television in a small dark room of the driving school. About a dozen other unlicensed teenagers watched. I heard sirens and closed my eyes.
“You, open your eyes,” the instructor said to me.
On the screen, a man was hunched over his wheel, blood all over. He was a trucker who’d drifted asleep while driving. He was dead now, the video’s narrator said. The screen then cut to an interview with his wife. She said she’d have to work harder now, pay for her children’s education on her own. Her tone sounded cold, annoyed. Was she an actor? Grieving in her own way? Maybe her tears had been edited out.
My mom kept a precise log of my driving hours. She marked the date and time of each drive.
“Your mom actually does that?” a friend asked me.
The state of Ohio abided by the honor code. After completing the required fifty hours, I registered for the written test. I’d just turned sixteen. I couldn’t die in a car accident at sixteen, as Jeanne did. My dad would blame himself.
“You’ll do fine,” my mom said as she dropped me off at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles.
One question asked how to maintain a safe following distance. I wondered about the distance between the car Jeanne had been in and the car ahead of her. In my mind I went on to connect every question to Jeanne. I chose answers quickly. I just wanted the test to end.
“I failed it,” I told my mom on the ride home.
“It’s okay,” my mom assured me when the test results arrived in the mail. “You can take it again.”
“Don’t tell Dad.”
“He won’t be angry. Why would he be angry?”
Jeanne.
I took the test again and passed with a perfect score.
MENTAL ILLNESS
Soon after I turned sixteen, the voice returned. Again, Jeanne, or maybe Jeannie. And again, on our staircase. Only this time it echoed. I gripped the blue railing and it felt loose. I began to climb and with each step the voice grew louder. I never thought I’d hear it again. The voice, though—something was missing, or something it was saying was missing something from it.
I went downstairs and took my keys. I told my parents that I was driving to the mall, or to a friend’s house, anywhere within our town’s borders—I forget. My parents wanted me to drive in town for at least a few months before setting out alone. I’d just received my driver’s license. But I needed to leave.
I nervously drove two and a half hours to an art museum. I stayed in my lane, afraid to pass the slow-moving car ahead of me. The trip should have taken maybe half the time.
I reached the museum and the quietness inside, which I thought would calm me, only emphasized my loud thoughts as I walked from gallery to gallery. I stopped when I noticed a small group of men and women clustered around a painting. A tour guide was describing the life of Vincent van Gogh.
The guide said that the artist’s brother Vincent was born, and died, March 30, 1852. The artist was born March 30, 1853. Every Sunday as a child, Van Gogh passed his brother’s marked grave as he entered the church where their father, Theodorus, preached. Whether the knowledge affected Van Gogh—that he shared both his name and birthday with a dead sibling—remained unknown, the guide said.
I went to the painting. A white house with a blue-tiled roof appeared in the center. A long stone wall climbed the canvas as my eyes skimmed the loose brushstrokes from left to right. The blue-gray sky didn’t look sad in the way that I thought a blue-gray sky would.
MOM
By my junior year, my dad could barely walk without a cane. Rather than use the wheelchair strung up in our garage rafters, he stayed at home and watched the news. He no longer could read. His tools in the garage gathered dust.
By my senior year, I realized that I might leave him.
I could take a year off, I told my parents. What did one year matter?
“Even if you went to community college,” my mom said, “you’d still be too far away. Do you understand?”
The schools I applied to were in Massachusetts, Illinois, Ohio, and New York.
•
“He didn’t want you in New York,” my mom tells me, “but he wouldn’t tell you no. I had to talk y
ou out of it. You didn’t know this, but after you told him you were applying there, he went in the bathroom and threw up.”
“I was so mad at you,” I say.
“Yeah, you yelled at me, told me I didn’t understand and that you’d go anyway. You took your car keys and drove to a friend’s house. But you came home an hour later and apologized. He hated to hear us fight.”
“We didn’t fight that much,” I say.
“But when we did. Don’t get me wrong, it was the usual teenage stuff. It had to do with a curfew or you going out of town with a friend. I don’t know, small stuff. I couldn’t even tell you what. The only time I remember your father raising his voice with you was when you and me were arguing about something. You were in high school. He couldn’t walk anymore, not without his cane. He got on his hands and knees and crawled up those stairs. You were standing at the top. He said, ‘I want you to respect your mother.’ Well then you lost it. You cried. You apologized. I think you cared so much about being perfect for him.”
DAD
My parents were downstairs, discussing our house. I eavesdropped through the grate in my bedroom floor.
“We might get $50,000,” my mom said.
“How much would that cover?” my dad asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “A year at a private college.”
Where would they go?
I applied for every scholarship I could.
•
The day the World Trade Center fell, I turned off the news and asked my dad to play poker at the kitchen table. I wanted the towers to stop falling.
“I was thinking,” I said. “Maybe I delay college, take a year off.”
The Glass Eye Page 4
