Fiction Ruined My Family Read online

  The first sign that he was no longer writing was he never mentioned submitting anything anymore, and then he wasn’t talking at dinner about things he was writing, and then he wasn’t even talking about things he was researching. He began talking about things he was going to write and this is pretty much where things stayed. Things he was going to write. At some future point. Until then, ideas went into tape recorders and file cabinets, all very carefully labeled, documented and organized.

  I remember when we watched The Shining. The Torrances moved to that inn in Colorado so that Jack could work on his book, and then reality set in—the isolation—and the father went nuts. My mom groaned like a sick animal from the divan at the scene when Shelley Duvall sneaks into his writing room and peeks at his novel and sees that he has been typing “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” for months.

  “Girls, turn it off. I can’t watch. I simply can’t watch,” Mom said.

  Dad’s next project after his second novel, Black Ink, didn’t happen was Stylebook, a computer program built to run on your writing, to improve your writing grammatically and stylistically. It was a genius idea. In 1984. When he began it. But it was starting to drag on with no end in sight. My dad hired some high schooler in New Jersey to build the software for Stylebook, and this kid, whom he called “the kid,” ended up making tens of thousands of dollars working for my dad. He went off to college with every dime my dad scraped together and the program never ran properly. Some company offered my dad $300,000 for his research, but he felt this was peanuts compared with what it was going to do on the open market, so he declined this offer. Stylebook was an earnest attempt to make money and get Mom off his back and get back to writing. I was told this is the kiss of death, doing something in order to “get back to the writing.” When you start doing this you’re fucked, you have to stay on the writing always and do whatever you need to concurrently. I was told, “Never do anything in order to write. Don’t take a job, don’t even take a shower in order to write. You’ll never get to the writing. You write.” Dad was the person who told me this.

  Stylebook was starting to drive Mom crazy. I knew he was going to get it handed to him. I saw him as a tragic hero. Like all tragic characters, he was trying to do the impossible—write novels, sell novels, make money, keep the drinking under control, get the cracked wife some help, take care of four kids. Like all tragic heroes he had a fundamental lack of self-awareness. Tragic characters don’t go to therapy, read self-help, do juice fasts or see psychics. They go blind, they’re banished from the kingdom, they hear ghosts. But they are good, noble in their pursuits, they just make bad decisions, have errors in judgment. He became increasingly saddening, if that’s a correct term. Some people are maddening, Dad was saddening. If Mom kicked him out would he be able to avoid the kind of solitary, elderly poverty that Grandma Darst, Crazy Kate, wound up in?

  LES MISSOURABLES

  MY FATHER MOVED his whole Stylebook operation into the kitchen. The kitchen was my mother’s office, so they were now sort of working at the same company.

  “The man has moved his goddamn word processor into the kitchen. MY kitchen! I’m about ready to have a breakdown here. I mean it.”

  Things were not good. Eleanor and Kate had to come home from college for a semester to work because Mom and Dad couldn’t pay their tuition. Like a professional chef, Mom was never hungry by the time dinner came around, never really ate a meal with us. She took one bite, lit a cigarette and began a sort of post-shift meltdown. We were, of course, the customers she was complaining about.

  “Nobody cares. Nobody cares,” she would lament from her seat at the end of the dining room table as if she were all alone. “Do they have any idea how long it takes to fold those layers of white cake into the round buche shape without them falling apart in your hands? Hours. Hours! Do you think the Smiths across the street are having homemade bûche de Noël tonight for dessert? Hardly.”

  We weren’t ungrateful, we were simply too busy stuffing our faces with food to compliment her cooking. By the time dinner rolled around it was usually going on ten o’clock. We’d already had about two bowls of cereal each just to last until dinner.

  “Well, I guess everyone hates the boeuf bourguignon,” she’d sigh, brushing at a holey area of her shirt sleeve that had caught on fire earlier. When she said things like this I always imagined my father’s old surf-casting fishing rod being cast in our direction.

  “No, Mom, it’s fantastic.”

  “Mmm, yeah, so good,” Katharine would say.

  “Doris, you’ve outdone yourself,” my dad would chime in.

  “No it’s not. It’s dry. It’s dry and I’m going to bed.” And she’d pick up her glass of wine and her cigarettes and she’d weave up the front staircase to her bedroom and shut the door. That was more or less how my mother now said good night.

  One night I went into my parents’ room and found my mother very upset and drunk.

  “I’m going to do it. I am. I’m going to do it.” My mother expressed a desire to die around this time every night. I hung my head. Every day was hard for her now.

  “I’m going to jump,” she said.

  I looked at her and her body, slumped off to one side of the divan. She was approximately seven inches off the ground.

  “Okay, well, whatever you think is best, Mom.”

  “I mean it, dolly. I’m going to jump.”

  “I understand.” And I walked out of her bedroom.

  Dad would never, ever utter the “a” word or even talk about it as even in the bag of things that might be wrong with Mom.

  When I said to him a few days later, “I think Mom’s an alcoholic,” he said, “Your mother’s not an alcoholic, she just thinks every night is New Year’s Eve.”

  Maybe she had to drink so much because all that crying was drying her system out and making her thirsty. The crying was like a Tony Kushner play—it started one night and ended three nights later. “I’m dying! I’m dying, baby!” she’d call out as you were heading out the front door. “Daddy was never around, you know. Never a-round!” There was so much boohooing and theatrics that we did become fairly used to it. “I’m completely alone. ALONE! Did you hear what I said?” she’d wail as Julia and Katharine and I tried to watch a movie. “Yes, we heard you. We heard you. You’re alone. Can you go be alone by yourself somewhere? We can’t hear the movie.”

  Mom apparently decided to dust herself off and not be so alone, because she now had a friend in Bronxville. This was when things really got out of control. Kitty Lagasse was a drunk and a dress designer whose clothing line was kaput for unknown reasons. Kitty’s husband, a Belgian toy maker, had died of an early heart attack, and so Kitty now supported herself making graduation and prom and cotillion dresses for Bronxville’s junior set out of her house. Her work was inspired. She really did encourage bravery in her clients, her dresses asked you to be something more than you were, and you felt special when she yelled at you in the big, open living room of her small, modern house with the giant sloped glass window. “Stop schlumping your shoulders! For God’s sake! You’re becoming a woman, this is a good thing, throw away those old corduroys, let’s move on! You’re gonna be Ava Gardner just for one night if it kills me! Oh, these girls!” Kitty was the physical opposite of my mother; she was brunette and had a figure like Orson Welles. Kitty and my mother tended to get in a fair bit of trouble. They were like Lucy and Ethel, only completely besotted, coming up with ways to make money. Most of these ideas were never executed but one that did make it out of the barroom was their wine bags. They made beautiful gift bags for wine bottles with leftover fabric from Kitty’s dresses (plaid taffeta and hot pink ribbons at the top). They were really nice and a good idea—there was nothing like them, but the bags never went anywhere.

  Kitty had lavish tastes, which got out of control and led her to do things like occasionally stuff a ham in her coat at the A&P. There was always an international cast of characters at her house who seem
ed to be shooting a Fellini film in her backyard. There was a nineteen-year-old Belgian boy living in her basement whom she was apparently screwing, and another nefarious character who claimed he’d been hanging out with Joan Didion in Guatemala the week before and who, it turned out, had been looting temples in Guatemala, without Joan Didion, and was storing the artifacts in Kitty’s basement.

  Dad was not happy about this twosome at all. “That Kitty’s got the scruples of an Arab slave dealer.” Mom was no longer concerned with what Dad thought about anything. Or what any of us thought about what she was doing.

  Her drinking was also completely out of control, which was infuriating, as I was trying to enjoy some out-of-control drinking myself. She was crowding the outfield.

  One night I was at a kegger and my boyfriend walked up to me with a queer look on his face.

  “Your mom’s here.”

  Even though I was semi-smashed I understood the implications of one’s mother showing up at a kegger. I looked around at the groups of kids, my eyes scanning the CB ski jackets quickly, running over the Bronxville High School football jerseys, desperately trying to locate the small woman hell-bent on squashing my existence.

  I hated Petey at this moment. I hated his jokey stockbroker father and his super-nice paddle-tennis-playing nonsexual yet attractive mother-woman, Pepper. I hated him for having an expensive car and for the fact that he didn’t black out and forget portions of evenings.

  “She’s over there, pumping the keg, talking to Dennis McSweeney.”

  “Great. Fucking great.”

  “Doesn’t look like she’s here to break up the party.”

  At that point I saw Dennis McSweeney stick his finger into my mother’s beer, showing her how to make the foam go down. My mother laughed and stuck her finger in her own beer as well. I walked over.

  “Jean!” my mother yelped.

  “Your mom’s the kegmeister now, Darst,” Dennis said.

  “Is Petey here?” my mom said, but before I could get my mitts on her, I heard Kitty’s crazy drunkard voice coming toward us. She slurred her speech drunk or sober, but Kitty also had a broken volume-control button so her voice often just flew randomly into a much louder volume.

  “Doris? Doris, where the hell are you? I’m LOST IN A SEA of tedious rugby shirts, oh God, NOTHING BUT PRIMARY COLORS, it’s really unbearable. Doris?” Kitty made it to the keg.

  My mother pumped the keg and filled Stu Patterson’s red plastic cup with foamy beer. “How about a brewski?” Stu laughed and stuck his finger in his beer. “You might want to tilt the cup a little when you fill it, Mrs. Darst, keeps the foam down.”

  “Okay, dear. Will do.”

  “Mom, let’s go home. C’mon.” We locked eyes. Hers seemed to say, “Why would I want to leave this terrific party to go home with boring old you?”

  “Doris, I have to agree,” Kitty said. “YOU’RE DOING a great job with that keg, but I’m JUST NOT A BEER PERSON. God, they don’t even have any wine at this party. Oh, these kids, I can’t stand it. The money, all the money these parents are shelling out for this ridiculous PRISON WEAR. What’s wrong with a great Geoffrey Beene wool suit? Or how about a FABULOUS FITTED JACQUARD BLAZER WITH A PAIR OF JEANS? I’m leaving, Doris.”

  Kitty went home and I managed to wrest Mom away from her duties as kegmeister and walk her down the street back to our house. When we got there, I found Eleanor and Kate on the glass porch watching Saturday Night Live.

  “Guess where I’ve been?”

  They were hoping I might wait for a commercial to bug them. “Where?”

  “At the Landers’, down the street.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, they had a party. Guess who was there?”

  “I don’t know. Who?”

  “Mom. Mom was at the party.”

  Eleanor and Kate started giggling. Kate put a needlepoint pillow of a Picasso figure up to her face to hide her laughing.

  Eleanor wanted to make sure she didn’t miss any more Saturday Night Live, so she jumped in: “Look, Jeanne, Mom said she was going to this party down the street. What were we supposed to do?”

  “I tried to stop her, Jeanne,” Kate said, laughing even harder. “I swear.”

  “Jeanne, you know you can’t stop Mom when she’s going to do something,” Eleanor said, picking up the clicker, preparing to unmute the TV.

  “Right. Because she’s five-feet-zero and there are two of you guys.”

  “Maybe no one noticed her at the party. She’s so teeny, no one probably even saw her except you,” Kate said, drying her eyes with her T-shirt.

  “Yeah, no one noticed a forty-three-year-old in a black pencil skirt and panty hose doing beer bongs with Hugh Masterson.”

  Kate gasped. Hugh Masterson was the first guy she’d made out with. “No!”

  “And Kitty knocked over about five people on the way out.”

  “Okay, shush, it’s Father Guido Sarducci,” Eleanor commanded.

  IT GOT QUIET around the house. Mom and Dad stopped going at each other—verbally, nonverbally, Mom throwing wine bottles at Dad, charging at him, slipping once and getting a black eye—and started going away from each other. Attacking each other we understood, moving away was more complicated. A war was upon Eleven Hamilton Avenue. My mother’s base of operations was my parents’ bedroom, while my father had set up camp in Eleanor’s presidential suite on the third floor once Eleanor and Katharine went back to school. My mother wanted everyone’s sympathy. Dad wanted her to straighten up and be the old mama, the mama who was game for anything, the mama who thought he was wonderful, exciting, brilliant and talented. Or in her terms, “the cat’s meow.”

  That kind of time travel was not on her agenda. Instead, Mom came out as a Republican. She had worked on Dad’s campaign for president of the board of aldermen in St. Louis, so this was hurtful to him and went against everything his family had done for the poor and for civil rights.

  With everyone else at college Mom and Dad waited for me to graduate from high school so they could sell the house and get divorced. I felt like I was a slow eater and the check had been paid and everyone had their coats on still sitting at the table, waiting for me to be finished.

  Meanwhile, Mom planned.

  AS SOON AS I graduated she would move into the city where she belonged. She was a city person, in case we didn’t realize this about her. She was unable to get by one more minute without Korean delis and takeout and gay colorists for confidantes. We didn’t know. Dad, during the in-house separation, was vulnerable, emotionally but also, obviously, financially. And I felt awful for him.

  Mom stopped cooking for Dad. She would make dinner and then as we were eating, Dad would come in the kitchen and chat cheerfully as he always did, only he would be preparing some really disgusting dinner for himself. Olives and some chicken livers. This was what he could afford. We were eating salad, leg of lamb, while Dad was sautéing chicken livers and a hunk of bread. He ate chicken livers four out of five nights. It seemed to me the most depressing thing in the world that someone should be banished from the family meal, made to eat something different, something inferior. Dad was helpless in the kitchen. He had no money, no cooking skills, no ideas about what to eat, really. There was no staff in the kitchen to prepare him a plate where he could sit and talk about working for the white man. He was fending for himself for probably the first time in his life. And I would rather not have watched.

  My mother seemed like Idi Amin eating her lamb in front of my father. Had she not studied the Geneva Convention? They were at war, yes, but there were rules. Food is life, theoretically, so if you stop cooking for someone, are you trying to kill them? It seemed to me this is precisely what she was trying to do.

  ONE MORNING DAD ASKED me how to use the washing machine and I didn’t know so we tried to figure it out together when Mom came in and said she was putting the house on the market.

  She had a prescient relationship with real estate well before people made li
vings as house flippers or devoured TV shows about making a killing selling a house. She just had a sense, which she had worked a few times in St. Louis before we moved to New York. She was like Columbo, being driven around in some real estate agent’s Cadillac.

  “You want to buy the worst house on the best street,” she’d say, chopping cucumbers in the kitchen. She prided herself on the fact that she had found our house, a house that was in her mind a piece of crap but one that was way up in value. When she sold it she really got into the fact that she had made so much money on it, like she had hoodwinked some suckers into paying through the nose for an illusion, for her illusion, one that she had birthed and paid for with her own money, suffered for, and was now unloading. She was “staging” before there was a word for it. I came home one day with my boyfriend, Martin, to find her tinkering with her mise-en-scène.

  “Martin, Jeanne. I need you to sit in the living room.”

  “But we were going to watch The Edge of Night upstairs in Julia’s room.”

  “Well, I need you to put a decent shirt on and grab a book, Dickens or better yet, Jane Eyre, and sit in front of the fire on the living room floor.”

  “Fire? It’s seventy-two outside.”