The Love Children Page 11

  One time I overheard her saying, “She needs you. She cares about you. You never call or write her. It hurts her.”

  I bit my tongue, I was so mad. How dare she talk about me like that to him! I stormed down the hall to her room, ready to shout. She was already hanging up the phone.

  “How could you do that!” I shrieked.

  She looked at me.

  “Beg him to see me! How could you?”

  “Begging? Oh, Jess . . .” She reached her arms out to me, but I stayed in the doorway, arms folded hard against my chest.

  “You made me sound pathetic!”

  “You know, sweetheart, it may sound that way to you, but it doesn’t to him. He doesn’t hear me begging. He’s so sure you hate him, that I hate him . . . He’s paranoid, honey, you know that. I was trying to reassure him that you love him. And you do, don’t you?”

  I hated that my eyes filled up so I couldn’t see. “No, he’s right! I hate him!” I screamed, then ran out of the room. I went back to my room and slumped on my window seat. I lit a cigarette and gazed out though the screen. A young man walked on the sidewalk by the house down below, all alone in the night, and my heart curled up with longing, as if he were my long-lost brother. His heels sounded on the concrete, all the way down the block as he disappeared. As the sound vanished, I felt my heart break.

  Dad called the house from time to time, before he remarried, begging Mom to come back to him, saying how he loved her, telling her he’d changed, he was different now. Then, when she’d say she wasn’t coming back, he’d start yelling and call her terrible names. The last time he called, we already knew he was getting married again. He called to beg Mom to come back to him. She said, “Pat! How can you ask me that when you’re getting married!”

  He shrieked, “Bitch! Slut! Whore!” and slammed down the phone.

  I knew this because I’d accidentally picked up the phone at the same moment Mom did. I felt overcome by what he’d said. I covered my face with my hands. My eyes were wet. I wondered what was the matter with my father. He was an ache, worse than a toothache, worse than a pulled muscle in my insides.

  I dragged myself into Mom’s room. She was sitting in bed with a book, smoking a cigarette. She didn’t seem upset at all.

  “Mom?”

  She looked up, then her eyes opened in alarm. “What’s wrong, Jess?”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  I sat down on the edge of her bed. “Is Daddy . . . ?”

  “Did you pick up the phone?”

  I nodded.

  “What’s the matter with Daddy, Mom?”

  “I don’t know, sweetheart. You know, he’s obsessed with me. Not that he loves me, or even likes me . . . He’s just obsessed. It’s beyond his control.”

  “Is that crazy?”

  She thought for a while. “It’s a pocket of craziness. We probably all have one or two, you know, places where we’re a little off . . .”

  I wanted to cry but I couldn’t. I wanted to scream but I didn’t.

  Mom began to talk in a monotonous tone. She was talking about Andrews and how it would be there and what we needed to do before I went. I wasn’t paying attention, but after a while she began to talk about clothes, and I began to think about what I needed for school, and I started to get a little excited.

  After a time, Mom went back to her book and I went back to mine. A few days later I got a letter from Dad, with a check for five hundred dollars. For clothes for school, he said. At first, I was furious. Did he think he could buy my love? But then I thought, well, Mom shows love with her cooking; Dad does it with money. Maybe it was all right. Part of me was thrilled to get the money, but the rest of me hated that I was thrilled to get the money and blamed him for sending it.

  Dad had written a real letter. He mentioned Andrews, which was a long trip from there to Brattleboro, which was near Dad’s place. But he wrote that he’d come and get me any weekend I wanted. He said he was remodeling the house, and had built a real room for me upstairs, but he would wait for me to say what I wanted done to my room—as if it was some sacrosanct space dedicated to me and not just a bare space.

  I could see how Mom’s divorcing him made him feel as though I was leaving him too. Maybe that’s why he acted the way he did when he called me that name. And I could see that he might feel that our leaving him meant we both thought he was a worthless human being. I just didn’t want him to be crazy. I was terrified that he might be crazy, because I loved him as much as I loved Mom, even if he made me cry.

  7

  My birthday was at the end of August, and after my friends came back from their summer away, Mom gave me a combination eighteenth birthday-going away party. She let us have beer as well as soda, because we were all eighteen by then. She stayed up in her room with her door shut and promised me she wouldn’t come out unless there was trouble. My friends smoked, and I had to go around opening windows and waving towels around to get rid of the smell of weed after they’d left, but Mom didn’t say boo to that.

  I said good-bye to Dolores and Bishop at my party. Dolores was all teary; she’d been teary for a couple of years now. I was annoyed with her for always being so distraught. She was going to UMass but she wasn’t happy, not at all. “I have to live at home!” she said, as if that was the worst thing in the world. I thought I might have been a little sad too if I was going to school locally, but I could see some advantages to it. I thought she always looked on the dark side. She used to be so brilliant. And she was still a wonderful artist when she put her mind to it. But she’d gained weight and these days she wore too much makeup and flirted outrageously, things you really didn’t do in our crowd. The night of my party, she kept crying, all night long. She said she would miss us horribly, and we said she’d make new friends right away, that everybody would love her, and she burst out crying again. I guess we were all sort of volatile that night, happy and sad at the same time, excited and frightened and unsure about what we were getting into, but I had a feeling that none of us would keep up with Dolores, that we’d sort of let her go.

  Steve didn’t come to the party. I didn’t know where or how he was. I couldn’t find him. I didn’t dare to call him and he hadn’t come around to Barnes in a while, or to my house.

  It was as if Josie’s look had ended things for us. She had finished something for me, I know. I couldn’t bear the thought that I was causing her more suffering, when I could see in her face and her body that her life had been spent mainly suffering. And I think Steve felt that too.

  But one day just before I was to leave for college, Steve came round to Sonny’s and asked me if I wanted to go for a drive after work. We drove out to Revere, to the beach, and sat there talking. I asked him if he was going to Harvard and he said he didn’t know. He held my hand and kissed me on the cheek as though he was saying good-bye. My eyes filled with tears; he was such a sweetheart, and I sensed I wouldn’t see him much anymore. Then he drove me home.

  Early one morning in September, Philo, Mom, and I packed up the car. When we were done, Philo and I stood gazing at each other, and then he grabbed me and gave me a great big hug and a kiss on the cheek and I clung to him. Then Mom and I set off for Andrews. I was flying. I hated to leave Philo; it hurt me to think I wouldn’t see him for a long time, but I was so thrilled to be going away that you’d think I was escaping from the Soviet Union. We drove for hours, Mom and I spelling each other. She offered to stop at Dad’s so I could have lunch with him, while she ate in town alone. But I wasn’t sure he’d want to stop working to have lunch with me; he never had when I lived with him. And besides, I knew there would be fireworks if he knew she was anywhere near, so we bypassed him.

  We stopped for lunch at a small coffee shop off the main road—Mom prefered any grungy thing to the fast food on highways. We had bowls of a delicious chili with not-very-good bread. Mom said bad bread was par for the course in America. Europeans, she said, really know their bread and have delicious bread everywhere. That made me
want to go to Europe.

  We reached Andrews in the afternoon. My dormitory was at Lester Hall, an old rambling three-story house with twenty bedrooms. We carried load after load of stuff up long staircases to my room on the third floor. There were an awful lot of stairs, but one of my roommates, a girl named Sheri, who was already there and settled in, helped us. Once everything was in the room, I had no idea what to do next and was grateful Mom was there. She whipped a tape measure out of her bag and did some measuring. Then we drove back into town. It was a tiny town, a cute little place with a Woolworth’s that had a creaky wooden floor. Mom kept oohing and aahing, saying, “God, it smells just the same!” as the five-and-tens from when she was a kid. She bought a hammer, a drill, and a screwdriver, saying I’d find uses for them. I couldn’t imagine what. She also bought curtain rods, shelving paper, a bathmat, and toothpaste—I’d forgotten to pack mine.

  We drove back to the dorm, and she climbed up on my desk chair and made holes in the woodwork with the drill, then used the screwdriver to attach brackets for the curtain rods and put them up. Aha! That was what the tools were for. She had brought up some Indian cottons she’d bought in the Square months ago, big pieces of fabric that could have been tablecloths, bedspreads, or maybe even saris. She’d made wide hems on two of them with iron-on tape and now she stuck the curtain rods through the hems and, presto! They were drapes! She threw the fifth, unhemmed one on my bed as a bedspread, so everything matched. We’d made my bed with the blankets I’d brought. I arranged my books in the bookcase, and she hung my clothes neatly in the closet— the only time all year they were neat. She put my lamp on the desk, and with enormous pride I laid my heavy new Selectric (my graduation present from Mom and Philo after all) on the desk. That really thrilled me, I have to say! And the room was done! Just like that!

  Mom arranged my desk drawers too, being a neatness nut like her father, as she said. She said his garage and cellar and attic were “filed.” While she was being neat, I was bouncing around with Sheri, a big girl with a big laugh whom I wasn’t sure I would like at first.

  I was sharing a suite with Sheri and another girl, Patsy. I loved Patsy the minute she arrived, her parents behind her, loaded down with bags and boxes just like us. The sight of each other made us all laugh. She was tall and dark haired, with a wry sense of humor like Sandy’s. I had been assigned the single room, Sheri and Patsy the double; the three of us shared the bath between. When she heard that three boys had the suite next door, Mom told me to lock my door at night. I thought she was being paranoid, but when night came, I did lock the door, anyway.

  I loved my room. Its wide window faced the quad, a broad lawn at the center of the campus. Beyond that were college buildings, built in squares around green areas. Stands of birch and pine trees reached into the far distance. Beyond them rose a mountain, green dotted with rust and yellow, an image by Cézanne. The view made me extremely happy.

  Registration was Friday and Saturday, and classes started Monday. I had to choose my courses and make up my schedule. All this was frightening. I’d never been allowed to choose my own courses or make up my own schedule, and it felt liberating but scary and made me a little hysterical. I think Sheri and Patsy were scared too.

  When I didn’t hear from Steve before I left, I calmed myself down by telling myself I’d be home at Thanksgiving and would see him then. Of course, by the time Thanksgiving came around, I was deeply immersed in my new life with new friends and didn’t even miss my home. I was enthralled with my roommates, and I met a girl I’d befriended when I worked at the café near Dad’s. Gail had transferred to Andrews for her sophomore year, and we stumbled into each other on campus. She’d taken a year off to go to Baja, California to get to know her father. She was brought up by her grandmother in Queens, New York. Her mother was a private detective; her parents were divorced. Her dad lived in Baja with his second wife. She was crazy about him and stayed out there for a whole year. She loved it there; she swam every day and got really tan. She said she was a pro at indolence, but that there was really nothing for her in Baja and in the end she had to come back. Her mother wanted her to finish college. Her dad didn’t care, she said: he was a happy guy who drank a lot and sat in the sun and played a banjo, living on his dividends.

  Hearing this inspired me to call Dad, and he drove up to fetch me one weekend. He drove me back to the cabin, which had become a house since I had last seen it, with a real kitchen and a bathroom—with a toilet! I couldn’t help saying that if he’d been willing to put it in a little sooner, he might have kept Mom. I said this even though I didn’t think it was true; I think Mom had about had it when they split up. He snapped at me not to be a smart-ass, but I didn’t care. In the car as he was driving me back to Montpelier, it came to me that I wasn’t afraid of him anymore. I didn’t know why I’d been afraid. He yelled, but he never hit me or anything. Still, I was glad to feel easier with him.

  What I’d realized was that Dad had three personalities. The first was the man who had Dad’s usual demeanor, the one he used with people outside the family—a really nice guy, amiable and sweet, with a self-deprecating sense of humor. You had to love him; he turned everything into a joke. From things she’d said, I’d gathered he was the one Mom married.

  The second didn’t appear right away, although soon enough, Mom said. That one was explosive, with a red face, eyes popping out of his head, and a booming voice so loud it hurt your ears. This guy could not hear over the sound of his own yelling, and he made himself madder and madder in tantrums that went on for a whole day, or a weekend sometimes.

  The third was a zombie. Dad became this when he felt defeated. He would walk around looking numb and not speaking, not present in his body. He could stay that way for a whole weekend, although often enough zombiedom led to explosion. He’d been a zombie the summer I lived with him in Vermont. I thought maybe that was why he got married again. It must have felt awful to be a zombie.

  In whatever persona he was in, though, he was deaf. He couldn’t take anything in from the outside. When he was in the first, you could talk to him and think he was hearing you, but he really wasn’t. He was locked in and all he could do was repeat himself, shifting from gear to gear, grinding them sometimes. I kept thinking there was a “real Daddy,” a person who loved Mom and me, who thought about us, but I never did find him. There was a person who claimed to love us and cried when he talked about it, but I think he was always crying for himself. Mom said once he probably really needed to cry for himself, but never knew he was doing it. She said something terrible had happened to him when he was a boy—his parents abandoned him when his sister died, and he never got over it.

  I was thinking about all this, lying in bed one night at Andrews, and I decided it was silly to feel hurt when he got angry with me or called me names because it wasn’t intentional. He wasn’t seeing me; he was seeing some figment that looked like me. I wasn’t real to him anymore—if I ever had been. Maybe no one was. Maybe real people merged with—who knows who?—his parents, maybe, his dead sister, kids he knew when he was young, people he’d read about in books or comics or seen in movies. As though he made everybody up. So when he yelled it was just because an object—me—was in his way. He was a tornado, beyond his own control, and whatever was in his path got blown to smithereens.

  The first persona had probably asked Julie to marry him, but when I visited them, he had shifted into the third. I didn’t know if Julie had met the second yet. She was nice but a lightweight and she would probably freak out if the second came up to her out of the darkness. You could see her trying to adjust to third when she kept expecting first, but because she didn’t understand what he was doing, she didn’t know what she was doing either. She always tried to be agreeable.

  I liked Julie because she didn’t try to be a mother to me. She tried to be my girlfriend: she was young and pretty and bubbly and she painted china. Dad looked at her—when he did look at her—with a kind of amused patience, very different
from the way he was with Mom, all intense and raging. He added a room on the back of the house to give Julie a studio, with big windows and electric heat. She spent her days there painting flowers and birds on cups and saucers and plates. They were pretty, her dishes; she sold them through a local cheese shop, not enough to support her, though. It gave her something to do.

  She asked me to choose colors and fabrics to decorate my room; she was eager to have the whole house finished, everything with dried flowers and pink bows and Laura Ashley fabrics and painted china everywhere you looked. I was shocked that Dad could stand to live in this environment and once I saw the rest of the house, I didn’t want my room done. I was afraid she’d turn it into another one of the cutesy magazine rooms that inspired her, like the picture of a kitchen that she’d put up on her bulletin board. So I got stubborn and said I wanted my room painted white and left alone. I had a brown-and-orange Navaho rug and an antique lamp with an orange globe on my desk and that was that. Julie was really frustrated, but Dad was amused and commanded her to leave me alone. I was pleased that he defended me, but sorry to see her hurt reaction.

  Dad worked in his studio during the day, so the only time I saw him that weekend was at meals. We did talk at dinner. Friday night Julie broiled chicken until it was truly dead and baked potatoes and made frozen peas. Dad gulped it in huge mouthfuls. After Mom’s cooking, you’d think he’d know it was bad, but he didn’t seem to. He asked me what I was going to major in, and when I said literature, he made a face. I said I wanted to be a poet, and he said I couldn’t be serious. And I said, “As serious as you were about being an artist.”

  “How are you going to live?” he asked.

  “How did you?” I retorted.

  He made a face. “Stop being a smart-ass. You know you can’t count on a man supporting you anymore,” he boomed.