The creators of The Brady Bunch got one thing right: They got rid of the other parents. Mr. Brady is a widower and Mrs. Brady is, uhm, well it’s not clear. In fact, no mention is ever made regarding the circumstances in which her first marriage ended. But guess what? It worked. Because the important thing wasn’t the status or whereabouts of the girls’ biological father. It was that they were now a part of a new family, which consisted of a mom, a dad, six kids, and Alice—the housekeeper.
I watched episode after episode, on a TV anchored to the ceiling from the comfort of one of the doctors’ lounge’s twin beds, eating individually wrapped packages of saltines.
Little did I know that my family would soon be just one kid shy of The Brady Bunch’s six. Only my version would suck.
In our Brady-Bunch-esque opening sequence, the screen would be split into four rectangles: one for Mom, one for Dad, one for Billy, age nine, and one for me, age six. Billy and I would be smiling. Mom and Dad would look a bit underwhelmed.
Then, a fifth rectangle featuring Dolly would pop in.
And they knew that it was much more than a hunch.
Mom would then start looking at Dolly with a frown. But Dolly would look straight ahead, appearing relatively harmless, polite even.
In would come a sixth screen, newborn baby Margaret. Everyone would look a bit ill at ease. Perhaps we’d hear the screechy sound of a needle being abruptly lifted off a record. Then, Mom’s rectangle would spin right off the screen altogether, like a tossed playing card.
In another moment, two new rectangles would pop up: one for Paul—Dad and Dolly’s second child, born seventeen months after Margaret—and one for Travis, Dolly’s twenty-something son from a previous marriage. I’m not sure if anyone would still be smiling at this point.
We would then have to quickly flash to black before showing a new screen, split between my mom and her new husband, Bruce. Mom would look like she was smiling after a good hard cry. Next, in would pop Billy and me again!
That this group would somehow form a family…
Or, to explain it to those of you who haven’t memorized the theme song: Dad remarried the month after the divorce came through and became a stepdad to Dolly’s son, Travis, while Dolly became stepmom to Billy and me. Soon after, Dad and Dolly had a second child together. And soon after that, Mom met and married a nice man named Bruce and moved back to her hometown of Pittsburgh.
Of course, one thing I really do understand now that I’m older is my mom moving two hours away. As a kid, I didn’t get it. The two-hour car trip felt like a lifetime. Why couldn’t Mom and Bruce live in Meadville or, better yet, in nearby Saegertown, where Dad and Dolly resided? But it makes so much sense to me now. In Pittsburgh, she wouldn’t have to live and work amid the swirling gossip of Dad’s affair-avec-love-child. In Pittsburgh, she could be surrounded by people who loved her—her mom, dad, and new husband. In Pittsburgh, she had a chance at a fresh start.
And as far as fresh starts go, she couldn’t have picked a better second husband. Whereas my dad seemed committed to doing whatever he wanted, no matter who he might hurt in the process, Bruce was focused on doing the right thing, to the best of his abilities, which were top-notch.
Bruce hadn’t just played college baseball and college football at the Naval Academy. He had been drafted by the Baltimore Orioles (he turned them down) and played backup quarterback to Heisman Trophy winner Roger Staubach before becoming first-string quarterback himself in his senior year. And he wasn’t just a Navy pilot, he trained under military instructors I’ve actually heard of, like John McCain, and could perform the kinds of aerial maneuvers I was previously only familiar with from Top Gun. And he didn’t just serve in Vietnam. He went and nearly didn’t come back. On a rescue mission, his helicopter (he could also fly those) was shot down in the jungle near the Laotian border.
He’d imagined a career in the Navy—becoming captain of an aircraft carrier was his dream—but his extensive injuries, which included a broken back, left him incapable of flying again and, therefore, of taking the kinds of jobs within the Academy he was most interested in. So, instead, he followed his faith. In typical Bruce fashion, he didn’t go about this lightly. He received a PhD in theology, writing his doctoral thesis on Puritan preaching. He then worked for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes before pastoring churches of his own in Kansas City as well as Chicago. But to be closer to his ailing parents, he moved to Pittsburgh, where he stumbled into a job managing charitable trusts at a major bank. Of course, he made time for teaching an adult Sunday school class and also occasionally acted as a substitute or interim pastor at the various Protestant churches across town. It was there at one of these churches, the one my mom grew up attending, where he first met my mom.
Thus, the introduction of Bruce into our family brought with it the introduction of Christianity. Whereas Dad and Dolly went off to Canada, just the two of them, to get married in front of a judge, Mom and Bruce had a sizable church ceremony. I was eight and got to wear a puffy peach ball gown and blue eye shadow, and read a passage from the Bible, the one in First Corinthians about how love is patient and love is kind. And though I may have been too young to have cared about the details of Bruce’s illustrious biography, I did know that the wedding was a good thing, that my mom was marrying a good guy.
But with Mom living two hours away, our joint custody schedule would no longer work; we couldn’t bounce between the two houses every other day. Given all of the above information, it seems clear where Billy and I should’ve chosen to live.
Only by the time we sat down in front of a mediator at the courthouse, Billy was eleven—he would start seventh grade in the fall—and I was eight, and all we really knew was that our mom (who seemed to cry an awful lot for a grown woman) was moving far enough away that if we wanted to go with her, we would have to change schools, friends, lives, etc. So, instead, Billy chose Dad, and though I don’t remember, I’m told I said, “Whatever Billy’s doing.” Which makes sense given that I was so obsessed with my big brother, I probably also added, “And if there’s time later, I’d love to talk to you about his wide range of talents. Of course, there’s his wrestling, but have you seen him play Tetris?”
Chapter 3
A Tale of Two Cities
Dolly was pissed when Billy and I decided not to follow our mom to Pittsburgh. “I didn’t sign up for Stepparenting 101, Bill!” we could hear her shout to our dad from the tiny laundry room she’d set up as an office for herself. I guess she had hoped we would disappear altogether, but I would argue that you kind of do sign up for Stepparenting 101 when you marry someone with kids.
By choosing to live with our dad, we thought we had chosen the path with the least amount of change, but, ironically, everything changed anyway.
Dolly and Dad lived in Saegertown (which had one stoplight and a population hovering around a thousand), and though the new custody agreement stipulated that I remain at the private Catholic school, Dad switched us to the Saegertown public schools anyway.
But most jarring was the new custody schedule. During the school year, we would spend the vast majority of time in Saegertown, only visiting our mom every other weekend. Then, during the summer, we would spend the majority of our time in Pittsburgh, with only two weeks in Saegertown. (Every other weekend, Mom picked us up in Saegertown on Friday after school, and Dad came and got us in Pittsburgh on Sunday after dinner.)
In this way, my life was split in two.
Pittsburgh became summer and Saegertown winter.
Pittsburgh was a standard split-level house in the suburbs—with central air and my own room.
Saegertown was a one-hundred-year-old farmhouse with poor insulation, where, despite the new three-story addition, Billy and I shared a room in the old, alternately sweaty and cold part of the house while toddler Margaret and baby Paul enjoyed rooms of their own—Margaret’s in the renovated and better insulated section.
In Pittsburgh, I biked to the bottom of the stree
t, where I could flip down my kickstand, dash in between two of our neighbors’ houses, and end up in the parking lot of a Togo’s, where I might buy a cherry-flavored Slush Puppie with the one-dollar bill my mom had given me earlier that day for this very scenario.
In Saegertown, we drove. Our house sat on a two-lane country road that connected to Interstate 79. (Everyone drove. And if you weren’t driving, it might be because you were working on your other car, the one you or your friend would drive in the big demolition derby that summer at the county fair.)
In Pittsburgh, we believed in God. The whole family—me, Billy, Mom, Bruce, and Grandma and Grandpa—went to church each Sunday we were in town as well as to Bruce’s Sunday school class.
In Saegertown, religion was for the weak, or so our father made a point of telling us, especially during the long rides home from Pittsburgh every other Sunday night.
In Pittsburgh, cooking dinner and cleaning up afterward were a part of our daily routine.
In Saegertown, cooking and cleaning were chores. I washed the dishes, swept the dining and living room, as well as the front porch, and burned the garbage. That was supposed to have been Billy’s chore, but since he was always at wrestling practice, it fell to me. (Have you ever tried to light a match and keep it lit long enough to catch something on fire in twenty-degree weather? With gloves on, it was impossible to grip the match properly. Without gloves but with frozen fingers, it was impossible to grip the match properly.)
In Pittsburgh, I ate food that I liked until I was full.
In Saegertown, I dodged food I didn’t like and was constantly hungry.
Seemingly overnight, Billy and I had gone from eating our nanny’s beloved Kraft macaroni and cheese and sliced hot dogs, to our stay-at-home stepmom’s thick, white-sauced beef Stroganoff, which always inspired the unspoken question: Shouldn’t beef Stroganoff be at least partially beef-colored? From our working mother’s commendable frozen chicken cordon bleu that came out of the oven bursting with melted cheese, some of which may have even crisped up a bit on the surface of the pan, to our stay-at-home stepmom’s hamburgers she cooked so beyond well-done that when you bit into them, the individual morsels of the ground chuck separated and scattered in your mouth like a thousand little pieces of rubber. (It’s also worth noting that my dad has not eaten chicken since 1971 when he watched a video about how it’s processed in factories, so when Dolly served something she called city chicken, the only thing we knew for sure was that it was not poultry.)
But mostly, Pittsburgh was where I was sure I was wanted.
And Saegertown was where I was sure I was not.
Under the umbrella of Stepparenting 101 fell various tasks Dolly made clear that she hadn’t signed up for either, like doing our laundry, making our school lunches, and/or allowing us to “infiltrate” her kitchen in the morning to make them for ourselves. We worked around these easily enough, though. Every other weekend, we returned from Pittsburgh with clean laundry and my sea foam green Eddie Bauer duffel bag loaded with granola bars, prepackaged Rice Krispies Treats, fruit roll-ups, and Dunkaroos, all of which I stored and often ate in the privacy of my bedroom.
What had Dolly apparently signed up for? Making sure we did our chores properly and that we finished our dinners. She was also on board with reminding Billy and me that she could never have abandoned Margaret and Paul the way our mom had abandoned us, and the occasional and straightforward “You’re never going to amount to anything.”
Unsurprisingly, my dad—the guy who put off disclosing the fruits (read: baby) of his affair to my mom until someone else did it for him—stayed out of the majority of these conversations, but on certain occasions, he couldn’t help but react. Like the time I got 99th percentile on my Iowa Tests (of Basic Skills) and Dolly’s response was that she’d gotten 99 pluses when she was a kid. “There’s no such thing, Doll,” I can remember my dad saying as he walked away, laughing to himself. Or the time she said that Paul, age five, had been outside on the rings of the swing set doing iron crosses. As she said it, she held her arms outstretched perpendicularly, demonstrating the positioning of the extremely advanced men’s gymnastics move there was no way a five-year-old could do.
My dad laughed, I think, not just because it was impossible, but because it really was funny the number of ways Dolly found to highlight how Margaret and Paul were special and Billy and I were not.
One of Dolly’s many incongruities is that though she was (to say the least) the opposite of cuddly, her name was Dolly, and she made and sold stuffed dolls. She painted the faces and then dyed the fabric with tea to give them a worn-in, antiquey look, which she emphasized by attaching a little tag with an old-lady name on it: Constance, Prudence, Eleanor, etc. I never loved these dolls, but I remember thinking that she did know how to paint a face. In fact, I told her so during one of the two times our family met with a counselor together. We had to go around the room and say one good thing about each other. “You’re good at drawing faces,” I said.
“You’re good at making Santas,” Billy said. (In the winter, she also made papier-mâché Santa Clauses.)
What she said to us in return is a mystery. I can’t remember; I can’t even summon up a guess.
After our mom moved to Pittsburgh, I began to understand that the world was more complicated than I’d previously considered. I also began to understand (and believe) that with the good things in life must come an equal number of bad things.
My mom moving away was a bad thing, but school was a good thing. I was on the advanced track in all of my classes, always got As, and Jeremy Mesley—one of the most popular boys—would often ask me to hold his hand at recess.
Having to always get a ride with the Petersons to and from gymnastics because Dolly wouldn’t drive me and because Dad was either working or picking Billy up from wrestling was a bad thing, but gymnastics itself was a good thing. I was one of the top gymnasts on my team, partly because every other weekend I practiced in an actual gymnastics gym in Pittsburgh, not the Meadville YMCA where class took place in the basketball gym, which meant we had to spend the first and last twenty minutes of each session setting up and breaking down the equipment.
As sixth grade turned into seventh turned into eighth turned into ninth, and I entered high school, the junior and senior guys asking for my phone number in the hallways in between classes became the good thing.
But coming home from school was always a bad thing.
A couple of years after the initial family merger, my twenty-three-year-old stepbrother, Travis, found a place of his own and Billy moved into his room, while I stayed alone in the one we’d shared. And when I think of Saegertown now, the first image that comes to mind is my room, and the floral wallpaper and the cobwebbed wooden rafters that paralleled the A-frame ceiling. It was where I spent the majority of my time, especially on the days I didn’t have gymnastics practice. From the moment I got off the bus until dinnertime when Dad and Billy would come home from wrestling practice, the house was nonnegotiably hers. And during that time, Billy’s room and my own were the only hospitable places.
I could only do homework and read for so long. So I entertained myself by wandering into Billy’s room and snooping around in his stuff. He had this book of fatherly wisdom Dad had given him for his birthday. Each page held a quote by someone famous, and Dad had annotated some of the pages with his thoughts: “I’ve found this to be particularly true.” And “I wish my father had told me this.” I was taken aback by the intimacy of it, by Dad’s handwriting itself. He’d never given me anything so personal.
Billy’s room, like mine, was in the old part of the house, and so it had these old details to it like the little rectangular, decorative cast-iron grate in the floor. If you got on your hands and knees, you could see right through it to the kitchen below.
I spent a lot of time there, comparing the way my stepmom talked to Travis to the way she talked to Billy and me. When Dad was around, Dolly smoked only in the laundry room, but dur
ing these unencumbered hours, the two of them—mother and son—smoked openly and chatted as she cooked. It was a big farmhouse kitchen where the island in the center held a stovetop across from a wooden bar with room for three stools. So Travis would sit at the bar while she fried up ground chuck. I could tell how much she loved her firstborn, and it felt strange to watch, like seeing a villain in a movie do something kind.
During those afterschool hours is when I began keeping a record of every time I wished I lived with my mom. I knew that I hated living in that house, but I also knew how hard it would be to up and move, to change everything yet again, and I figured that it might help if I had proof of my daily moments of unhappiness. So, in the last page of my diary, I began adding hash marks for every time I thought about it. One for every time I went to bed hungry; one for every time she made me redo a chore I hadn’t done properly; one for every time I woke up in Pittsburgh with a sense of dread on those Sundays Dad was set to pick us up; one for each time I had to wave good-bye to my crying mother from the backseat of Dad’s van; and one for each time I flipped the lights on in my Saegertown bedroom only to find the century-old room still dark and gloomy.
By the end of the school year, the tiny hash marks filled the page.
Inertia is defined as “a property of matter by which it continues in its existing state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, unless that state is changed by an external force.” The key words there being external force. We feel we are too old to start over again, so we don’t quit our jobs. We feel we waited too long, so we don’t go back to school. We feel we missed the proper time frame, so we sometimes don’t even buy wedding gifts.
Inertia kept me living in Saegertown for five years.
But the summer after my freshman year, I was tentatively proactive. I told my mom that I wanted to look into moving in with her full-time just in case.
I spent that summer entirely in Pittsburgh, forgoing the requisite two weeks in Saegertown. That summer, I was fourteen—old enough to begin to see the holes in my original theory that all the good things that happened to you had to equal the bad. I was old enough to see how desperately my mom wanted me to live with her. What if, I began to wonder, you didn’t have to wait for things to happen to you, good or bad? What if all I had to do to live the life I wanted was open the door and step into it?
Bon Appetempt: A Coming-of-Age Story (with Recipes!) Page 2
