I’m sure my dad’s long rambles on the narrow coastal roads were due in part to his eagerness to stay out of the house, which must have been oppressive for him, even though Mom was remarkably good at keeping her anger in check, and Craig merely rolled his eyes.
Dad didn’t know any other form of parenting, so what was he supposed to do anyhow? His father was a World War II sailor who never acknowledged his paternity and has never been more to our family than a name on a piece of paper. My grandmother Betty, an alcoholic model and hatcheck girl at mobster clubs in the New Jersey Palisades, lost her children to foster care when my dad was three and my aunt Mimi was eleven. After Betty got out of prison for child neglect, my dad’s family time was limited to the few weekends when Betty convinced one boyfriend or another to ferry her out to the home of his foster parents, and take him on Sunday drives.
Among the few clear memories my dad has of me as a child is from when I was three: we are in one of his cabs, driving up the coast. He is looking down at me, and he is so happy to be there because, as he says, it is so “far out” to talk to me. I am listening to every word he says in the most intense way possible, creating a feeling within him that he sums up like this: “It’s always nice if you can find one other person in the world who listens to you.” Of course I was happy to listen to him. He had shaped me to be his best listener, ever. Grocery store clerks still tell me their secrets to this day.
My father did all of the usual dad pranks of driving with no hands, until I was sure we would crash, barely righting the car at the last minute, or sometimes driving with his knees. All of which made me shriek and giggle and feel as if we were two merry pranksters. Until my dad began pinching his waistline.
My dad had this habit, which he used to distract himself from his severe back pain. I anxiously watched his hand sneak down to the fabric of his shirt. This pain was my enemy. I didn’t want it to make him go away. I always wanted to spend as much time with him as possible, and I would have done anything to keep him with me forever.
But I had to make do with his visits. When my dad came up to Maine, he couldn’t afford a motel. Our house was small—only 740 square feet, including the bedrooms upstairs—and the only two rooms with doors were the bathroom and Mom and Craig’s room. There was no guest room. For the first few years, we didn’t have a couch. And so he stayed in my room with me.
As we settled in at bedtime, I rolled away from him into the crack between my bed and the wall, calming myself with my stuffed lamby and the familiar cool of the Sheetrock against my skin. I loved him more than anything else, but I was scared by the intensity of the love I felt for him, and how it bloomed when I was near him, because he was largely a stranger to me.
He shifted next to me, trying to compact his adult frame into my tiny bed, and I held myself tightly together, careful not to let our skin touch, overwhelmed by everything. I could feel the adult tension like a held breath in the house and couldn’t stand that what I wanted most was obviously so hard on everyone else.
As the inevitable end of his visit drew near, I felt a rising dread. He had raced up the driveway in a flurry of yellow, and now he must drive away. He squatted down and hugged me good-bye with a scent of sandalwood and a scratch of beard. From my post at the window, I watched his cab flicker through the trees, away from me again.
A few months later, when I was five, my dad got a girlfriend: Phyllis. She smelled like essential oils and had long, brown hair and an intense bothered air that perplexed and upset me. When he visited that summer, she came with him. Not only did I now have to share my father with this person, but she seemed not to like me. Everyone else in my life had always rolled with my constant chatter, laughing and encouraging my insights. Even Craig, who could sometimes be harsh, was more likely to school me with sarcasm than scolding, and once I was old enough to master a cutting remark myself, I often earned laughs from him. Phyllis was different.
My father and Phyllis camped in our front yard and, ever eager to be near my dad, I slept in their tent with them. The three of us were close together—she was brushing her hair; he was stretched out on his sleeping bag; I was chattering away like a chickadee.
“Sometimes we play that we’re squirrels, and we each have a house in a tree, but it’s not a real house, it’s make-believe. Or sometimes my house is that big rock over there. That’s also our picnic rock. Sometimes Mom has a picnic on it with me. I want to have potato chips like in a restaurant. But we don’t have potato chips. We have carrot sticks. And when I’m a squirrel, I gather nuts and berries for the winter. Because—”
“Will you ever stop talking?” Phyllis snapped at me.
I froze, paralyzed.
I looked at my dad. He didn’t speak or even seem to register what was happening. I was on my own. I shut up and stayed that way.
The next day, the three of us got into my dad’s cab and went on our version of a family vacation. We drove inland to a picturesque waterfall and swimming hole called Smalls Falls, just south of Rangeley Lake. My dad threw himself into an impassioned reverie—over what was essentially a roadside pit stop—about the beauty of Maine and the greater simplicity of life in a place where people still lived close to the land. After we had admired the falls, the woods, and the good, simple people, we returned to the car.
In a show of good-natured naïveté, my father had left the doors unlocked, and everything had been stolen—Phyllis’s expensive camera, all of the luggage, and worst of all, my little overnight bag with my brand-new gold lamé bathing suit, which I adored, and my most beloved stuffed bear of the moment. I was devastated. I looked at my dad. He had deflated like a kid who’d just dropped the pop fly and cost his team the game.
“What is wrong with you?” Phyllis lit into him. “How could you be so stupid?”
I remained silent and looked away, embarrassed for my father. It was the only one of my dad’s few visits that I did not want to last forever.
That fall, it was time for me to go to school. I had been in kindergarten for a week or two when I settled into my seat on the floor with my classmates one morning. I became aware of a hushed shadowy conversation being held just beyond my perception, but clearly about me. A woman turned and smiled at me.
“Come with me, please,” she said.
I didn’t know much about school yet, but I could tell this wasn’t the way things were normally done. As the other kids stared at me, looking glad they hadn’t been singled out, I obediently followed her into the hallway and down the corridor.
A smiling teacher with short salt-and-pepper hair, Mrs. Falagario, gestured to an empty desk near the back of an orderly row. I faced another wall of staring eyes.
“Why don’t you sit there?” Mrs. Falagario said.
Embarrassed, but also curious, as I was always interested in going someplace new, I walked silently to the desk and awkwardly slid in, uncertain through and through.
“If you look inside, you’ll find all of your supplies for the year,” she said. “They’re your responsibility, so you have to take good care of them, okay?”
I nodded and glanced down at the opening of the desk and my own box of crayons and small plastic ruler. We had all of this at my house, sure, but something about being given my own little corner of the world at school felt special to me; I immediately determined my desk and supplies would be impeccable and stay that way.
Just like that, I was in the first grade. They hadn’t known what to do with me in kindergarten because I could already read and was mature for my age, so they had skipped me a grade ahead. There it was: I was good at school. But I wasn’t just going to be good. As with my maintenance of my school supplies, I was going to be perfect.
I had been in day care a few hours a week, but this was my first extended exposure to kids off the land. Most of them came from generations of locals. As with all transplants to Maine, those of us on the land were known as “from away,” even though it’d been several years since we’d moved. Their dads hunted. The land
had written bylaws that included no pesticides and no shooting of guns. They had heard of the Beatles, but they were more into Lynyrd Skynyrd.
At least I was attending elementary school in a mostly poor lobstering community in the early eighties, so no one had much of anything I didn’t. Kids weren’t brand conscious yet, so the fact that Mom sewed some of my clothes wasn’t noticeable to them.
The only stressful part of the school day was lunch. I brown-bagged it like most everyone else. Only, the other kids ate Jif and Fluff on Wonder Bread, with a Ho Ho for dessert. The whole wheat bread I loved helping Mom bake was often dry and had to be sliced thick to hold together. Paired with peanut butter and honey, this made for a cementlike sandwich. When I grew old enough to understand that making fun of myself first was the best way to ensure other kids didn’t tease me, I dubbed them “suicide sandwiches.” I didn’t even try to get anyone to trade lunches with me.
Around the time I started first grade, in mid-October, we drove down to my grammy’s house in Pennsylvania for Mom and Craig’s wedding. Craig’s family, who owned a flower shop in nearby Ocean Grove, New Jersey, had arrived early to set up the flowers—potted chrysanthemums that formed an aisle in the sloping grass of Grammy’s front yard, leading to a trellis woven through with flowers—every little girl’s dream. Even better, Mom had made me a special lace-trimmed dress to wear as I scattered rose petals down the aisle. I adored the fact that I looked like a littler version of her.
Because there is only a scattering of photos before Mom and Craig’s wedding, it has always felt like our family began then. But my heart rebelled against these wedding photos because my father was not in them. As much as I was a part of this family in reality, I did not entirely feel like I was. Even worse, I suspected that to accept membership here was to betray my father.
I went down to Boston, early the next year, to visit my dad at his apartment in Somerville, where he and Phyllis now lived together. At bedtime on the first night of my visit, I completely lost my shit, the one and only occasion on which I have ever done so in front of my father. There was something so unsettling about going to sleep in this strange place with my dad and this woman I’d only met once, and Mom nowhere nearby, that was just too much for me. He held me as I kicked and shrieked in panic and frustration. Nothing was the way I wanted it to be, and I was too little to do anything about it, and I hated being so sad, and I was fed up with being left lacking, again and again and again. The meltdown went on and on, until I collapsed into exhausted sleep.
My meltdown seemed to make an impression on Phyllis, who softened toward me. We had planned a picnic for the next day. But of course we awoke to find the sky unleashing a torrential downpour—even when my father was trying, things never seemed to go his way. I was despondent until they saved the day with the kind of magical thinking that made time with my father such a treat. We would have an indoor picnic. Phyllis let me help make the picnic lunch, teaching me how to peel a hard-boiled egg for egg salad, while we listened to an old record of Babes in Toyland that had belonged to her as a child, the day and the visit rescued by her kindness.
I didn’t see my dad for a few years after that. He was present so infrequently in my childhood that it’s illogical to link his absence to my emotional display. But I was careful not to behave so badly again. And not only because I feared scaring him off, but because my freak-out had frightened me. When I had an overload of feelings around Mom and Craig, they formed a stable adult wall that confined my tumult—maybe it was uncomfortable to smack up against them, but it also felt safe to know I was contained. My father offered no such stability. I had to constantly stretch myself to handle the unknown just to be with him.
The next summer when I was six, my dad’s mother, Betty, began taking an active interest in me. I was not to call her Grammy or Bubby, or even Grandmother, all of which she felt would have aged her inconceivably. Instead, I was to address her by her given name, Betty. My mother and I took to calling her “the Big B,” a homage to the grandiose B with which she signed the constant cards she sent.
Her own stab at parenting made my dad seem worthy of an award by comparison, but now that she was sober and earning a good living as a practical nurse to rich clients in Manhattan, she had taken to grandparenting with a vengeance. I was very lucky to have her, and not just because of the severe lack in her son, which she was probably trying to make up for, but because we were kindred spirits in many ways.
Betty represented everything I aspired to and feared I didn’t deserve. She lived in Manhattan, and her temple was the Macy’s in Midtown, her patron saint Estée Lauder, the only cosmetics worth wearing, according to her. And wear them she did, reapplying her bright red or coral lipstick at the table after every meal I ever ate with her.
Although she had never really made it as a model, she had been beautiful enough, and enjoyed adequate success with men because of it, that she hung on to a haughty pride about her looks. This would have been startling enough in the wilds of Maine. It was compounded by the fact that I was the kind of country girl who was sprinkled with freckles and had thick, frizzy hair with a tendency to tangle and snarl.
Like other little girls, I adored pink and dolls and ballet. But I was hopeless at girly things. I spent all of my time reading or playing in the woods. And Mom, who sewed most of my clothes and believed that girls should be as free as boys to enjoy their childhood fancies without concern for their appearance, was in exact opposition to Betty. It wasn’t a problem, exactly. I adored Betty’s posh ways and lapped up the many precious dresses she sent me in beautiful boxes from Macy’s and Lord & Taylor, encased in diaphanous sheets of tissue paper that smelled like spun sugar. But even with the gifts, Betty frequently observed me with a critical eye.
That first summer, the Big B sent her commandment up from New York City for Mom to find us suitable lodging. She then arrived by Greyhound bus. Mom dutifully picked her up and took us to the cottage she’d rented, where Betty and I proceeded to sit for the next week. Betty couldn’t drive, didn’t cook, and outside of the city, she only seemed interested in reading the paper and smoking cigarettes.
Betty didn’t like to discuss her past, which I later learned had been painful. She didn’t speak much of my father, who seemed uneasy about her role in my life, if grateful for her generosity toward me. And when she did speak of him, she could be cutting, as she was regarding just about everyone, including me. My father later told me how she’d been orphaned by age eighteen and swindled by a lawyer out of a piece of family property in Cleveland; how her husband, a theater actor, had abandoned her and their daughter for Hollywood; how her boyfriends had led her to become an alcoholic; how when he was a teenager it seemed likely she’d started drinking again in secret, and had sometimes been a kept woman, if not an outright whore; how she’d used food to control him as a boy, and let him smoke and drink in the apartment as a teen, hiding him when he went AWOL from the US Navy, all, he believed, in an attempt to manipulate him, but also, he had to grudgingly admit, as a kind of twisted unconditional love, as was the fact that she gave him money and a place to stay, no matter how bad his gambling was.
Betty would sometimes talk about how she’d taken my father to the Jersey Shore with this or that boyfriend when he was young. I loved her anecdotes because they were so exotic to me and contained the character of my dad as a child, which I had trouble wrapping my mind around, just as I did with the stories Grammy told me about Mom.
The people in Betty’s stories—not just boyfriends, but also the friends who took her on car trips or rode out to Atlantic City with her on senior bus outings that included a roll of quarters—always dropped out of her life at some point in the tales. Even at an early age, I had a feeling that her strong personality had driven them away.
Betty had a loud voice that carried, and she felt entitled to speak unpleasant truths because of her age. At the same time, she was deeply paranoid. Once when I spoke Betty’s name too loudly in a store, she glared at me.
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“They’ll hear you,” she hissed.
I froze, unused to being addressed so harshly.
“Who?” I dared to ask.
“I can’t have everyone knowing my name,” she said, looking around her.
Now I was afraid, but for a different reason. This strange woman was my caretaker for the week.
Betty relished eating out, and she especially liked the kind of fatty, decadent food that was forbidden in my household. As she sat dousing her French fries in salt, I watched, wide-eyed, until my inner Good Samaritan got the better of me.
“You shouldn’t eat so much salt,” I said. “It’s not good for you.”
“I’m old,” she crowed with a big, hearty laugh. “I want to enjoy myself.”
Mostly, her visit had the hushed, stopped-time languor of a hospital waiting room. I watched Betty read the paper, apply her lipstick, and smoke. Our rented cottage was a drab, simple affair that was supposed to be within walking distance of the beach. It might have been, but I don’t remember us going to the beach even once.
The next summer, Betty returned. Our rental this year was one of a half dozen neat white cottages with dark green shutters that matched a larger house with rocking chairs on its porch. My fear at what embarrassing thing Betty might say to the other guests as we sat in these chairs was trumped by my relief from the constant boredom of sitting in the cabin with her, and we spent long hours rocking together while she smoked.
Our new cabin was within walking distance of one of my favorite places in the world—the Pemaquid Point Lighthouse. Betty and I walked to the lighthouse every day, me prattling along as I did. “Why is that little building by the lighthouse red?” I asked.
Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986) Page 3
