I cruised through the sixth and seventh years of school with plenty of exchanged notes and flirtations, and even a few public declarations of mutual adoration without consummation of the relationship by a kiss. But then Jack arrived, the first boy who made his affection clear, in a way that suggested I might be missing out if I didn’t manage to find a way to be together outside school hours. He invited me to a party being thrown by a friend of his.
Perhaps it was the two years of moping and crying and moaning about all the other kids who were allowed to attend boy-girl parties, but for some reason, on this one, I managed to wear my parents down. They said I could attend the party as long as no alcohol would be present and the parents were home. It seemed a respectable enough agreement. And easy enough to break. The parents of the boy hosting the party would be home, but they couldn’t care less about what was going on in the basement—and though they told my parents there would be no alcohol allowed, the boy’s eighteen-year-old brother supplied plenty.
Jack and I ended up on a waterbed making out after I had three beers. I had never felt anything so delicious in my life. He covered my neck in hickeys. I went home and once again made the mistake of telling Gayle, for the same reason I told her about smoking a joint. I felt it was important as her older sister to blaze trails for her.
A few days later, I was at a friend’s house when Dad made a rare appearance to pick me up. On the ride home he asked me if I had really gotten drunk at the party they had allowed me to attend. We sat in silence. I had never seen him so angry.
When I walked in the front door, Mom’s eyes were full of rage. My lack of reaction no doubt infuriated her further. She announced I was grounded for a month. I was happy to confine myself to my bedroom for the rest of the evening.
I passed Gayle wincing on the stairs with an “I am so sorry” look. I knew she was clueless, incapable of keeping a secret. I told her it wasn’t her fault. When I woke up on Saturday, keeping my usual teen hours, I came down to grab some lunch. Dad was leaning against the counter, Mom at the table.
“Tell your daughter I can’t stand being in her presence,” she said.
Dad and I looked at each other. She was serious, but it had that particular brand of over-the-top-ness that made it impossible to take seriously. Out of my mother’s view, Dad raised an eyebrow, and I gave him our secret sign, then acted as if I had made a wrong turn and headed back up toward my bedroom. Halfway up the first set of stairs, the phone rang. I heard my mother tell whomever was on the other end of the phone that I no longer lived there. I tried to imagine which friend she had just embarrassed, all of mine being the polite kind.
Dad went out of town on Monday, and I went off to school, relieved to be free from the relentless noise that was traveling through my nerves and into my head. I thought for sure Mom’s mood would blow over in a couple of days, but the silent shame treatment continued throughout the week.
When Saturday morning rolled around, I overheard one of the neighbors whom I regularly babysat for at the door, telling Mom she was dropping off the money she owed me and asking if I could help them that night. My mother, intent on her campaign, said I wasn’t available because I was grounded for drinking. It had the effect she hoped for, as I came down the stairs, hoping to interrupt her, but the neighbor had left. Mom threw the eight dollars at me. “There’s your drug money. You’re not responsible enough to babysit.” I picked the bills off the floor and climbed the stairs, humiliated.
That night all I could think about was my Sunday reprieve was close. I was still quite active in my church: youth group, choir, Sunday school, Sunday service. It was a serious activity for me, like a sport—I trained regularly. Some of that had to do with convenience of location; the church we had joined was right across from my junior high school parking lot, so I wasn’t dependent on my parents to get me there.
But it was also because the teenage youth program at this church was unusually strong, no doubt because of its progressive outlook. We’d talk about things like feelings in our youth group retreats. The youth choir was popular due to the choir director, whose name was Mel Olson. He was in his fifties, wore saggy jeans, a beard, and high-top sneakers. Just the choir itself had one hundred teenagers, ages thirteen to eighteen, the cool kind you’d want to hang out with. Besides offering excellent vocal coaching, the director organized a singing tour.
We traveled by bus through the Badlands in South Dakota, stopping in shopping malls, then over the Grand Tetons in Wyoming, hitting a series of retirement homes, before dropping down to Utah to visit a Mormon church, and then heading back over the flat panhandle that is Nebraska, stopping at Native American reservations along the way. At night we’d camp, perform skits, and tell ghost stories around a campfire. It was actually easier to score booze and marijuana if you wanted it there than it was at school.
On Sundays, I usually caught a lift from a couple who served as youth group leaders and lived nearby. Church was the place I’d get my inner equilibrium back. My community there was bound to help me sort my feelings out, figure out what I could do to make it right. But that morning, I woke up late and missed the ride. The house was oddly quiet, which is perhaps why I overslept. When I came downstairs, there was a note waiting, saying the family had gone to a movie. I don’t think our family had ever gone to see a movie together.
I ran back up to my room and sobbed. I couldn’t imagine how long the confinement was going to continue, how much more I could take. It had been near ten days now, long enough for it to start feeling like the new norm. I knew Dad was leaving the next morning, and true to form, he hadn’t dared interfere with the management. He’d never say it, but we knew it—it wouldn’t be worth the scene Mom was assured to create.
The worst of it was that I had been wrong to drink, and it was worse that I lied about it. That made her 100 percent right and me 100 percent wrong. She was right to be angry. But not for two weeks. As I began reorganizing my room for the fifth time, I found a leaflet in a pile of papers they had given us at a youth church seminar. It said, “Ever Feel Like Running Away?” It was a brochure on a halfway home for teenagers called the Walt Whitman Center. They advertised a counseling hotline and said they provided a home away from home for troubled youth.
I dialed the number and explained I felt like running away like it said on the leaflet. The woman on the line kindly explained that kids were usually placed there by the state after they had broken a law. So I explained I had broken the law, and after a brief hesitation, the counselor said yes, I could come. There was one thing, though—I would have to tell my parents where I was going in person. She asked, did I feel I could do that?
When Dad, Mom, and my three sisters returned from the movies, I was waiting with my suitcase at the bottom of the stairs. I explained to my parents that I was going to the Walt Whitman Center, that it would probably be best for all of us, and asked if they could give me a ride.
“You’re running away and expecting us to drive you?” Mom smirked in disbelief. She was actually stunned, yet at the same time amused at my audacity.
I looked at Dad and told him I’d be happy to call a cab.
“Listen to that, Jim. She’s happy to call a cab.” Which I did.
And so I voluntarily turned myself over to state custody to be “rehabilitated” with other juveniles who were making their way through the Nebraska State penal system. I was surprised when we pulled up to find myself at a normal house in a neighborhood in easy traveling distance from my school. It was one of those Sears and Roebuck catalog houses: four large bedrooms upstairs and a warm cozy living room downstairs with a good-size kitchen.
The next morning, I caught the city bus to school and arranged for rides to and from church activities. A few friends knew of the change, but the center had made the transition effortless. Group counseling sessions were held at four-thirty P.M., and everyone in the house was required to attend. We had a couple of hard drug addicts, a dealer, a prostitute, a teen mother, a kid who robbed
stores, and a car thief—all aged between thirteen and sixteen.
We were allowed to smoke, the one concession to an otherwise strict code of regulations including rules about curfews, house chores, language used, respect, fights, and any kind of sexual contact between housemates.
The general mood between staff and kids was one of mutual respect. A lot of the conversation involved the jargon of Narcotics Anonymous, a recovery program for drug addicts, and Alateen, a support program for kids affected by someone else’s alcoholism. For the first time in my life, I was hearing stories that reflected my experience at home with Mom.
Though I wasn’t guilty of breaking any serious laws, my problems were taken seriously. I was made to feel my choice in asking for support was wise, and not a way of denying responsibility for my behavior as my mother claimed it was. No one was laughing at me for packing my bags. And the staff became more empathetic when Mom came in for the family therapy sessions.
After five weeks, they told me that I was reaching the limit of my allowable stay. I was going to have to go back home or choose another option—foster care. I started to grow desperate. Just when I was beginning to feel what it was to have my own emotional equilibrium, free from the threat of Mom’s next mood, I couldn’t believe I was going to have to go back to living under the same roof as her.
I started breaking the rules. I cussed, I made out with one of the housemates, and finally I came home two hours past the five P.M. curfew. But it didn’t work. They had no choice but to call my parents to come pick me up. I didn’t care. My mother was thrilled when she was called. I had just proved again that I was definitely on the road to criminality, that the rules held for everyone but me. Even a court-mandated halfway home was kicking me out.
In Which I Ponder a Father-Daughter Connection
Oxford, 1997—Six months after Dad returned home from our visit in Oxford, I got a call from Mom, telling me Dad had checked himself into the psychiatric ward at the hospital for depression. I choked.
“What happened?” I asked. “Was there some kind of episode?” He had seemed so perfectly happy in Oxford.
Mom said he just woke up and asked her to take him in. And then she shared that they diagnosed him with bipolar disorder, that he wasn’t going into any intensive therapy, they were just holding him until the medication had a chance to kick in.
It occurred to me, looking through my adult eyes, that this wasn’t the first time Dad may have been clinically depressed. But manic? I was just recently with a friend whose illness was on the manic end of the spectrum. I’d never seen Dad approaching this hyperactive state of mind.
“Did something happen to trigger the depression?”
“No, he just said he was seriously depressed, so I told him we could take him to the hospital.”
I thought back to the conversation we’d had at Mario’s, but making his breakdown about our Oxford dinner conversation teetered on grossly self-centered.
“I understand the depression, Mom, but what cause did they have for the manic-depressive diagnosis?”
“Well, you know, he’s been impulsively buying things.”
“Like what?”
“He bought that old army jeep. Then there was the John Deere riding mower. And let’s not forget the time he bought three vans”—she paused—“on the same day. Did he tell you about that? And then there’s the time he went out for a walk and came home with a pregnant mare he bought from a farmer he had met in a field. And there was all that running gear he bought in Oxford. Weren’t you with him when he did that?”
I suddenly wondered if Mom had been providing input to the doctors and I grew irritated. In defense of my father, it wasn’t like he made all these purchases in the last couple of months—he had acquired them over two years, and there was sensible logic behind each.
The army jeep had only cost five hundred dollars and had nostalgic value, bringing back good times in the service.
The John Deere “Made in America” tractor mower—well, that had been a fantasy as long as I had known him, a sort of homage to all the guys at the John Deere factory he used to work with. He was older and spent a lot of time in the garden, always had, and mowed the lawn religiously on Sundays. So what if it was overkill for the size of his lawn?
The van? He had told me that day on the phone it had been a sloppy process, but it’s not like he kept all three. He just kept changing up for a better deal, and it just so happened all on the same day. If he hadn’t been successful in taking the first one back, he would have never dreamt about returning the second when his real dream vehicle drove by with a For Sale sign on it. He saved himself ten thousand dollars. He wasn’t being ruled by his impulses, he just had more courage than most to correct his mistakes. At least that’s how I remembered it.
And the horse? The owner didn’t think he could sell her pregnant and needed her moved. Dad told me he offered to help him out with sales skills, and after running the numbers decided it would be a good investment.
“And then there was the inflatable boat,” Mom said.
“What inflatable boat?”
“The one at the condo.”
“What condo?!”
“Didn’t he tell you about the condo?” She told me that she had found a vacation condominium near Myrtle Beach in South Carolina that was a dream property investment. She had hired a management company to rent it out when they weren’t there. It had been her idea. I believed her. That Mom was smarter than Dad was obvious to everyone.
“But when has he been manic, Mom? I’ve never seen him manic.” Well, maybe there was that one time . . .
In Which My Father and I Share Notes on Depression
Washington, D.C., 1986—In the years after I left home at eighteen (an abrupt departure, I might add, as Mom, in a dramatic scene of Shakespearean proportions, insisted Dad kick me out or she’d leave), I would occasionally call my father at his office for a little coaching, a self-help recharge. It was like we’d pull over at a highway rest stop to pause for a moment.
As I no longer had to contend with Mom’s moods at home, I found Dad’s skills as a life coach of great value. Three-ring-binder tape cassette courses had replaced his collection of self-help books, and he’d listen to them on his sales trips across the Rust Belt. Driving through Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and the western part of Pennsylvania provided lots of listening hours. He had moved from the Stoics to their modern counterparts. He could have taught Dale Carnegie’s Leadership and Sales Training Course without referring to a manual, was able to cite all the greats—Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Zig Ziglar’s See You at the Top, Tony Robbins’s Awaken the Giant Within. Our calls would bring me back to our childhood Chautauquas.
If I wasn’t in the mood for self-help, he’d cheer me up with his corny humor or a little karaoke. He’d sing the background line to the Blue Swede’s seventies pop song “Hooked on a Feeling”—“Ooga-Chaka-Ooga-Ooga.” It developed into a game where we’d try to zap each other. Dad—“I was talking to a union guy at the Pittsburgh plant the other day, and we were discussing the talking points he’d use to recruit members. Those guys have a job cut out for them. You would have loved the conversation. You’ll never guess what he said to me.” “What? What’d he say?” And then he’d zap me by singing “Ooga-Chaka-Ooga-Ooga.”
Though I could always count on him to veer wide around history, he’d go deep in the present with practical questions. How was I sleeping? Was I avoiding the drink? (I never did manage my alcohol well, so I made the pragmatic decision to quit when I was twenty-two.) How about exercise? It never crossed my mind that we might be sharing notes on mutual depression.
One day a package arrived. It was a Walkman with a cassette of the Rocky soundtrack inside. I also found a scrawled note in his handwriting, recalling our time in New York, reminding me of early morning winter runs up the wooden gym bleachers, suggesting I use the theme song, “Gonna Fly Now,” to power me up the U.S. Capitol stairs. On another
occasion he sent a letter that, when I opened it, spewed hundreds of those little dots cut from a hole puncher.
Then there was that time he called me. He asked how things were going. I gave him the background brief, waiting for the real reason he called. He shared that he had finally run for town mayor, and that my mother had left him—both in the same sentence. She had been “friendly about it,” he said. “You know, she was never happy here in Laurens, and I didn’t listen. It’s my fault and I deserve it.” And then he added the zinger, “If I’m honest though, it’s not so bad. I’m kind of enjoying being on my own.”
It wasn’t said with full-hearted enthusiasm, yet I heard a mighty crack. My father had never said one thing that would suggest anything but absolute loyalty to my mother, and though he was careful to take responsibility—“I deserve it”—the “it’s not so bad . . . I’m kind of enjoying being on my own” phrasing meant we might finally be free to negotiate the terms of a more honest relationship. It was clear it hadn’t occurred to him that the real reason Mom left was because she had her own behavior she didn’t want brought up for public scrutiny.
He went on to tell me that Mom had moved north thirty miles to Emmetsburg, the town where her job was located. This forced him to reexamine what he was doing with his life, to make a few big decisions.
He was leaving his company, selling his shares, putting the house on the market, and the reason he called was to ask if there was anything I might want. He was holding an auction for everything Mom left behind. I thought about it, my emotions catching up. My bedroom had been dismantled long before, my lion poster disposed of, and my books were with me, so the answer was no. Finally, he shared the real kicker.
Dancing with the Octopus Page 12
