by Alice Sebold
As Mary grew less and less sympathetic, I compensated and became the emotional overlord—soothing my mother and condemning my sister. When Mary helped, I was glad to have her there. When she whined and entered her own incipient version of my mother’s panic, I shut her out.
The only memory I have of my father expressing physical affection for my mother was a brief kiss as we were dropping him off to catch a suburban limo to the airport, where he would embark on his annual academic trip to Spain. The reason for this isolated incident could come under the heading of “Let’s Not Have a Scene.” Simply, it was my prompting, then begging, then whining that brought on the kiss.
By then, I had begun to notice that unlike my parents, other couples touched each other, held hands, and kissed on cheeks. They did this in supermarkets, walking around the block, at school occasions to which parents were invited, and in front of me, in their homes.
But it was the kiss my father gave that day upon my urging that let me know my parents’ relationship, if solid, was certainly not passionate. He was, after all, leaving us for a number of months, as he did yearly, and I felt that, with an absence of that length, an expression of love was owed my mother.
My mother had gotten out of the car to help my father with his bags and to say good-bye. Mary and I were in the backseat. This was my first time seeing him off on his yearly trip. He was flustered as he always was. My mother, always nervous, was flustered too. Sitting in the backseat, I remember I got it into my head that something was not right with the picture in front of me. I started whining, “Kiss Mom good-bye.”
My father said something akin to “Now, Alice, that’s not necessary.”
Surely the result was not what he hoped for.
“Kiss Mom good-bye!” I yelled louder and popped my head out the back window. “Kiss Mom good-bye!”
“Just do it, Dad,” my sister said bitterly beside me. She was three years older and maybe, as I imagined later, she knew the score.
But if what I’d wanted was to gain confirmation that my parents really were like the rest of the couples in Spring Mill Farms, and perhaps like that famous TV couple of the time, Mr. and Mrs. Brady, the forced kiss didn’t do the job. It opened the door for me. It made me know that in the Sebold house, love was duty. He kissed her on the forehead, the kind of kiss that would fulfill the demand of his child but nothing else.
Many years later, I would find black-and-white photos of my father with daisies in his hair and submerged in water with flowers surrounding him. He was smiling, showing the teeth he hated because they came in helter-skelter and his family hadn’t had the money to fix them. But he had been happy enough in these photos not to care. Who took them? Not my mother, this much I know. The box of photos had arrived at our house after my grandmother Sebold died. I searched among the photos for clues. Against my mother’s stern warning not to take any of the photos in this box, I tucked one inside the waistband of my skirt.
Even then I felt the absence of something I couldn’t then name and it hurt me for my mother, who I instinctively knew needed it, and would, I imagined, flourish under it. I never begged or made a scene over his lack of affection again because I didn’t want to encounter that emptiness in their marriage.
I soon discovered that only the unconscious touch slipped by inside my house. As a little girl I would sometimes plan my attack, the goal: to be touched. My mother would be sitting at her end of the couch, doing needlepoint or reading a book. For my purposes it was best if she was reading a book and watching television at the same time. The more distraction, the less chance she would notice my approach.
I would take my seat on the far end of the couch and slowly inch my way down to her end, where I would contrive to put my head in her lap. If I made it, she might rest her stitching hand if she was doing needlepoint, and casually finger the locks of my hair. I remember the cool feeling of the thimble as it touched my forehead and how, with a thief’s awareness, I could tell when she became conscious of her actions. I might encourage her then by saying I had a headache. But even if this bought me a few extra strokes, I knew the jig was up. I debated, until I became too old to play such games, whether it was better to remove myself from her or to be pulled, reluctantly, off her, and told to sit up or go read a book.
The soft things in my life were our dogs: two sloppy, loving bassetts named Feijoo and Belle. One name was that of a Spanish author my father admired and one, condescendingly for him, a word that the “uneducated” might recognize. “French for ‘beautiful’” my father would point out.
My father commonly called my sister and me by the dogs’ names and this was a clue as much to who was closest to all of our hearts as it was to how preoccupied with work my father was. Dogs and children were the same to him when he was working. Small things that begged attention and needed to be put out.
What the dogs knew was that there were four distinct environments in our house and they rarely came together. There was my father’s study, my mother’s bedroom, my sister’s bedroom, and wherever, throughout the house, I might be holed up. So Feijoo and Belle, and later Rose, had four places to try for attention. Four places where a hand would, distractedly, reach out to fondle their ears or reach down for a good hot spot scratch. They were like comfort caravans, carting their lumbering, drooling selves from room to room. They were our comedians and our glue, for otherwise my father, mother, and sister lived in books.
I struggled to be quiet in the house. While the three of them read or worked, I kept myself busy. I experimented with making food in odd ways. I squirreled away Jell-O and made it under my tall four-poster bed. I tried to make rice on the dehydrator in the basement. I mixed my mother’s and father’s perfumes in little bottles to create new scents. I drew. I climbed boxes up to the crawl space in the basement and sat for hours in the dark cement hole with my knees drawn up. I played histrionic games with Ken and Barbie where Barbie, by sixteen, had married, given birth, and gotten divorced from Ken. At the mock trial, where the courthouse was made out of poster board I’d cut up, Barbie gave her reason for divorce: Ken didn’t touch.
But I would get bored. Hours and hours of “finding ways to occupy myself” gave way to hatching plots. The bassetts were often my unwitting assistants. Like all dogs, they nosed through the trash and under beds. They carried away trophies: smelly clothes, used socks, unattended food containers, and whatnot. The more they loved it, the harder they fought to keep it, and the thing they loved the most, with an animal passion that makes sense of the phrase, was my mother’s discarded maxi-pads. Basset hounds and maxipads are a love marriage complete. No one could tell Feijoo and Belle that that particular item was not meant for them. They were wedded to it.
And, oh, the scene, the lovely scene. It wasn’t a one-person or two-person job, it was the whole thundering house. The “horror” of it made my father hysterical and my mother adamant that he get involved in the chase. The sheer thought of it was obscene! Maxipads! The bassetts and I were happy because it meant everyone came out of their rooms to run and jump and scream.
The downstairs of our house was laid out in a kind of circle and the bassetts had figured this out. We chased them round and round from front hall to back through family room, kitchen, dining room, and living room. The bassett assisting—the one sans maxi-pad—would bark and bark and cut us off at the pass when we attempted to make a lunge at the lucky one. We got smarter in our tactics, tried to block them with doors or corral them in the corner of a room. But they were wily and they had a clandestine assistant.
I let them get by. I false-lunged. I gave my parents and sister misdirection. “Back hall, back hall!” I would yell, and three hysterical people would run that way. Meanwhile the bassetts were happily hiding with their snare underneath the table in the dining room.
Eventually, I took matters in my own hands and, when my mother stepped downstairs to the kitchen or was reading outside on the porch, I would lead the most available bassett into her bedroom and turn my back
.
Within minutes:
“Bud! Feijoo has a Kotex!”
“For Christ’s sakes!”
“Mom,” I’d say helpfully, “he’s tearing it up!”
Doors burst open, footsteps on stairs and rug. Screaming, barking, raucous, joyous scene.
Always, though, as these scenes resolved themselves—disgruntled bassetts going away to lick their paws—my mother, father, and Mary would return to their rooms. I would be in the house at large again. Lonely.
In high school I began as a geek. A geek because I played the alto saxophone and, as was required of almost every musician save the lucky violinists, if you played, you marched. I was in jazz band, where, as second alto, I jammed on such tunes as the “Funky Chicken” and “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.” But getting down with my bad self was not enough recompense to be labeled a band geek. So, after marching in a Philadelphia Eagles half-time show where our band formed the shape of the Liberty Bell on the field (as an indication of my marching skills, I was asked to be part of the crack), I quit band. Later, without me, the band won a state championship for marching. The feelings of joy over my absence were mutual.
I went from music to art. Ours was a crafts-oriented art department and I loved the raw materials. There was silver, hunks of it. And, if you were good enough, gold. I made jewelry and cut silk screens and fired enamel. Once, with Mrs. Sutton, half of the husband-and-wife team who ran the department, I spent a whole afternoon pouring molten pewter into coffee cans of cold water. Wow! The shapes! I loved the Suttons. They approved all my projects, no matter how impossible to complete. I made a long-haired-Medusa silk screen, and an enamel choker of two hands holding a bouquet of flowers. I worked swiftly to finish a set of bells for a present for my mother. They featured the head of a lady with two arms forming a frame. Inside the frame were two bells with blue-heart nipples as the clappers. The bells made a fine sound.
I followed in the wake, academically, of my perfect sister. She was quiet, neat, and got straight A’s. I was loud, weird, and obsolete. I dressed like Janis Joplin ten years after her death and I defied anyone to make me study or care. I still got by. Teachers, individuals, touched me. The Suttons and a few English teachers combined to make me care just enough—if you didn’t point it out to me—not to become a druggie or a pothead or spend the free periods outside in the smoking lounge hiding doobies in my boots.
But I could never be a druggie because I had a secret. More than anything, I finally decided, I wanted to be an actress. And not just any actress but a Broadway one. A loud Broadway one. Ethel Merman, to be exact.
I loved her. I think I loved her even more because my mother said she couldn’t sing and couldn’t act but that her force of personality was so strong that she took the attention away from everyone else on stage. I wore an old feather boa and a sequined jacket that Father Breuninger held back for me from a church clothes drive. What I sang, as loudly and as charismatically, I hoped, as my idol, was her signature song. Traipsing up and down our spiral stairs with the bassetts as my audience, I belted out “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” It made my mother and sister laugh and my father loved it more than anyone. I couldn’t sing either, but I would cultivate what Merman had, or try: force of personality. Bassetts at my feet. A little extra weight. Seven years of braces and rubber bands. There seemed no better time to break into song.
My obsession with Broadway and bad singing led me to friendships with gay boys in school. We sat outside Friendly’s ice cream shop on Route 30 and sang the soundtrack from Bette Midler’s The Rose. Gary Freed and Sally Shaw, voted the cutest couple in our school, walked by on their way to Gary’s ‘65 Mustang after a Saturday-night sundae. They laughed at us in our black clothes and the silver jewelry we made for cheap in art class.
Sid, Randy, and Mike were gay. We were infatuated with people like Merman, Truman Capote, Odetta, Bette Midler, and the producer Alan Carr, who appeared on Merv in large, brightly colored muumuus, and who made Merv laugh in a way that other guests didn’t. We wanted to be stars because as stars, you could get out.
We hung outside Friendly’s because there was nowhere to go. We all rushed home to watch Merv if we knew Capote or Carr would be on. We studied Liberace. Once he flew in on a guy wire over his piano and candelabra with his cape spread out. My father loved him but my friend Sid didn’t. “He’s making an idiot out of himself and he’s really talented,” he said, as we smoked cigarettes outside Friendly’s near the Dumpsters. Sid was going to drop out of school and move to Atlantic City. He knew a hairdresser there who, over the summer, had promised to help him out. Randy was sent to military school by his parents after “an incident in a park.” We weren’t allowed to talk to him anymore. Mike fell in love with a football player and got beat up.
“I’m going to live in New York when I grow up,” I began to say. My mother loved the idea. She told me about the Algonquin Round Table and the people who sat there, how special they were. She had an outsider’s mythology of New York and New Yorkers. She thrilled at the idea of me ending up there.
The year I turned fifteen my mother decided my birthday present would be a trip to New York. I think she worked herself up to go by pretending my excitement about it would keep her from collapse.
On the Amtrak train up from Philadelphia, she began to have a version of her panic. The dreaded flap. It grew worse as we sped toward New York. I was so excited to be going but as she rocked back and forth in her seat and her hands trembled—one on her right temple and one rubbing the space between her breasts—I decided we should go home.
“We’ll come another time, Mom,” I said. “It’s okay.”
She argued. “But we’re on our way. You want this so much.” Then, “Let me try.”
She pushed herself. She fought to function normally. We should have turned back when we reached Penn Station. Both of us probably knew this. She was a mess. She couldn’t walk upright. She had wanted to walk up from Penn Station to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Eighty-second and Fifth so we could see the shops and Central Park along the way. She had spent the weeks before planning it. Told me that on Forty-fourth was the Algonquin, and that I would get to see the Ritz and the Plaza, where she was sure my idol, Merman, often stayed. Maybe we would take a ride in a hansom cab around Central Park and see the famous apartment building, the Dakota. Bergdorf’s and Lexington. The theater district, where Merman’s musicals were playing. My mother wanted to stand in front of Sherman’s statue and, as a daughter of the South, say a silent prayer. The duck pond, the carousel, the old men with their model sailboats. It was my mother’s gift.
But she couldn’t walk. We stood in the cab line out on Seventh Avenue and got in one. She could not sit up straight. She kept her head between her knees so she would not throw up. She said, “I’m taking my daughter to the Met.”
“You all right, lady?” the cab driver asked.
“Yes,” she said. She implored me to look out the window. “This is New York,” she said as she stared at the dirty floor of the cab.
I don’t remember the drive up save for crying. Trying to do what she said. The buildings and people were a blur to me. “I’m not going to make it,” she began saying. “I want to, Alice, but I’m not going to make it.”
The cab driver was relieved to reach the Met. At first my mother stayed in the backseat.
“Mom, let’s just turn around and go back,” I pleaded.
“In or out?” the cab driver said. “What’s the story?”
We got out. We crossed the street. In front of us were the monumental steps up to the entrance of the Met. I was trying to look around and take it in. I wanted to run up those steps thronged with people smiling and taking pictures. Slowly, with me leading my bent-over mother, we made it up some twenty stairs.
“I have to sit down,” she said. “I can’t go in.”
We were so close.
“Mom,” I said, “we made it, we have to go in.”
�
�You go in,” she said.
My fragile suburban mother sat in her good dress on the hot cement, rubbing her chest and trying not to throw up.
“I can’t go in without you,” I said.
She opened her purse and took a twenty from her wallet. She shoved it in my hand. “Run into the gift shop and buy yourself something,” she said. “I want you to have a souvenir of the trip.”
I left her there. I did not look back at her smallness on the steps. In the gift shop I was overwhelmed and twenty dollars didn’t buy much. I saw a book called Dada and the Art of Surrealism for $8.95. I rushed back out after paying for it. People had surrounded my mother and were trying to help. There was no pretending now.
“Can we help you in some way?” a West German man and his concerned wife asked in perfect English.
My mother ignored them. The Sebolds did everything themselves.
“Alice,” she said, “you need to flag a cab, I can’t do it.”
“Mom, I don’t know how,” I said.
“Go to the edge of the sidewalk and stick your hand out,” she said. One will stop.”
I left her and did as I was told. An old bald man in a yellow Checker cab pulled up. I explained that my mother was the one on the steps. I pointed to her. “Could you help?”
“What’s wrong with her? She sick? I don’t want sick people in my cab,” he said with a heavy Yiddish accent.
“She’s just nervous,” I said. “She won’t throw up. I can’t move her by myself.”
He helped me. After living in New York as an adult I know how rare this was. But something about my desperation and, to be honest, my mother, he felt sorry for. We made it to the cab and while I sat in the backseat my mother lay down at my feet on the old Checker’s big back floor.
The cabbie kept up the kind of patter you pray for. “You just stretch out there, missus,” he said. “I wouldn’t drive one of those new cabs. Checkers are the only kind of cab for me. Roomy. Makes people feel comfortable. How old are you, young lady? You look a lot like your mother, you know that?”
