THAT’S WHAT PEOPLE DO WHEN THEY LOVE EACH other.
I needed to remind myself of that. To say those words over and over again—the words that Daddy had said the night before. At least he had stayed. At least I had kept him from going into the city and coming back who knew when.
My dad rested on a white wicker chair on the porch of the little house across the road from ours. We called the place the Forge because it had once been the workplace of the blacksmith who had built our home. When my parents bought our place, the man who had been my dad’s comedy partner, Nick Ullett, bought the Forge. But Nick never used it, so we kept it up for him. Kathy and I loved the wide porch in back. It jutted over the river, and we could fish from it, not that we ever managed to catch anything. The Forge was to be rented out for the spring and summer to Daddy’s boss, Henry Beard, and Daddy had taken me by the hand to help him sweep out the cobwebs of winter in preparation for Henry’s arrival.
We didn’t talk much while we cleaned. I didn’t know what to say. And as the sun set and my dad rested, I looked over at him and thought about what he had told me last night while he lay next to me in bed: “That’s what people do when they love each other.”
And I did. I loved him so much. More than I loved anyone on earth. So why did I feel so scared? And so ashamed? I tried squeezing my eyes tight against the tears, willing them back. My lips started to quiver, and I pressed my mouth shut. My father must have noticed.
“Treasure, come over here and sit with me.”
I looked at him and realized that, for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to. For the first time, I didn’t want to be on his lap, in his arms, against his chest. But as I had the night before, I did as he asked. I walked slowly across the porch and sat stiffly on his lap.
“I am an asshole, Jessie, a drunken asshole.”
I looked into his eyes, and I could smell the cigars he smoked mixed with his sweat—just as I had last night. Then I burst into tears. Daddy said nothing more, and when I stopped crying, he took me by the hand and we walked back across the road.
What was he trying to tell me? That he was sorry about what happened? But why? Wasn’t it what people did when they loved each other? Why should he be sorry then? My head spun. I didn’t understand what we had done. And I couldn’t figure out how I was supposed to feel about it. Daddy wasn’t an asshole. It must’ve been my fault. He must’ve seen me there crying and thought that maybe I didn’t love him anymore.
I didn’t know what to think, how to feel. I just knew things had changed with my father. And the nightmares came for the first time soon after.
It’s dark and I’m in the house alone, wearing the same nightgown he had made me take off the night before. Every room is dimly lit, as though the bulbs have been switched from 175 watts to fifteen. I look out the kitchen window and see a shape by the barn. It moves toward the house, toward me, and I know that it wants to hurt me. Maybe it’s a man, but it seems like a monster, and I run to the kitchen door. I try to lock it, but the bolt won’t budge. The door flies open and becomes so heavy that I can’t push it shut. So I run into the empty living room and try to lock the side door. The old, rusty hinges break off, disintegrating in my hands, and I sense the monster coming closer. I run up the narrow stairs to my parents’ room. The windows are wide open, and like the door downstairs, have become too heavy to shut. I look out their window and suddenly a bright spotlight falls on the figure. It’s a man whose face I can’t see. I’m petrified. The kitchen door is wide open. The hinges in the living room have fallen to dust. The windows won’t budge. There’s no way to keep the man out.
Or the other dream:
I’m stuck in a deep hole, a well maybe. I can just barely see the sky. The hole smells musty and damp, and it’s so small I can’t lie down. My knees are pressed to my chin; my arms are pinned to my sides. My hair covers my face, and I gasp for air. Then I hear voices. My mother! My sister, Kathy! They’re looking for me, and I hear them walking around the hole calling, “Jessie! Jessie, where are you?” I try to call out to them: “I’m here! Look down! I’m right here in this hole! Help me! Please help me get out!” But when I open my mouth, no sound comes. I strain and strain, but I can only hear myself whisper. I know then that they will never hear me, that I’ll be stuck in the hole forever.
I began sleepwalking. Some mornings, I woke to find objects tucked into the corner of my bed: a rolling pin from the kitchen, a bar of soap, a wooden duck figurine that had been on one of the shelves in the living room, the china eggs that went with it. I never understood why I had taken them. I was like a six-and-a-half-year-old Lady Macbeth.
Of course, I told no one. How could I? What would I tell them? That Daddy had made me do things I didn’t understand? “That’s what people do when they love each other,” he had said. In my heart, I so desperately wanted to believe him. But my head seemed unwilling to let me. And that conflict, that irreconcilable conflict, began to take its toll.
I never liked Lebanon Township Jail, but now I felt terrified to go to school. And to the ballet class I had always loved. And of being outside at all. My ballet teacher tried everything to get me to come back to the dance studio, but I went into near hysterics at the idea. I clung to my mother and had to be carried sobbing back to the car. I didn’t even understand why.
I grew attached to my mom, even though I never considered confiding in her. How would I explain something I didn’t understand? I had always adored my father, and even if I had thought that what he’d done was wrong, I had no illusions about my mother standing up to him. So instead, I simply hid. When she took Kathy to school in the mornings, my shame kept me in the Scout. All of us had conjunctivitis that spring, and I had gotten a very bad case. I knew what pinkeye looked like, so I used it as a way to stay home. I’d wake up in the early morning darkness and sneak down the ladder of the bunk beds I shared with Kathy. Then I’d tiptoe into the bathroom off the landing, shut the door, and switch on the light. I was still too short to see my reflection in the mirror, so I’d position a stool to stand on. I’d lean toward the mirror and go to work on my eye. I chose the right eye because I could barely see out of it anyway. (Kathy and I had both inherited my father’s astigmatism). First, I would tuck all my hair behind my ears. Then I’d use my index finger to rub all over the eye—on the lid and on the soft skin underneath. The rubbing burned, but I needed to look convincing. When it almost glowed red, when the white looked completely bloodshot and the skin around it raw, I would stop to inspect. Then I would spit on my hand and rub the saliva over the entire area. I hoped it would look like pus. Sometimes, if I had some of the little specks of sleep on my eyelashes, I would carefully collect them in the palm of my hand and press them into the corner of my eye to make it look crusty.
When I was satisfied, I would climb off the stool and head back to my bunk. Then I’d lie down very carefully, positioning my head just so on the pillow. It was critical that none of the crust I’d created fell off my eye. If it did, I might be sent to school.
When I heard my mom getting up in the next room, I would give my eye one final, careful rubbing just in case the redness had started to fade. She usually woke up alone; Daddy had begun spending entire weeks in the city.
“Mommy, my eye still hurts!” I’d tell her.
She would peer at me. “Well, it still looks bad.” The fateful pause. Then: “You’d better stay home.”
Relief.
I was always nervous that when we dropped Kathy off at school, one of the teachers might run out to the Scout, grab me, and force me into the building. I would hide as best I could, sometimes covering myself with my jacket. But no one ever came out. They had clearly given up on me.
Back home, without my dad around, I headed upstairs to my room to lose myself in a make-believe world—the sort I could control. Inside the walls of my Victorian doll house sat delicate furniture from a store in New York. Each room was full of tiny replicas—plush nineteenth-century sofas, mahogany tables, and porcelain bathtubs with tiny claw feet. I had minute plates of food: iced cakes, loaves of bread, cheese boards, and whole chickens. I wanted nothing modern, especially the family that lived in the house. The mother wore a long Victorian dress, the mustachioed father a dark suit, the children black button shoes. They had a nursery with cozy brass beds, a rocking horse, and thumbnail-size copies of Kate Greenaway books. My house even had a nanny, bedecked with a black cap. I camped next to the house, sticking my face into their living room, admiring the straight-backed, red, velvet sofa, the tiny grandfather clock, and the fake wood burning in the fire place. The nurse became Mary Poppins and sent the little girl and boy up to their beds in the nursery. I pretended that she was tucking me in along with them, kissing me on the forehead. “Spit spot into bed,” I made her say. And none of them had pinkeye.
My mother pried me away from that world long enough to take me to the doctor. If he thought my pinkeye was fake, he didn’t let on. He prescribed drops that would cure conjunctivitis, but of course they wouldn’t work on me. After weeks and weeks of the morning rubbing ritual, Mommy suspected I was making up my illness—mainly because my conjunctivitis always got mysteriously better on Saturday but worse on Monday. But she thought it simply had to do with how much I hated school, and she arranged for Kathy and me to transfer in the fall. I doubt she had the emotional energy to examine what was going on with me anyway. Looking back, I’m not sure she truly wanted to be a mother—not then, when she was surrounded by a group of creative singles looking to make their way in the world. Here she was, shuttling us to school and packing sack lunches. There they were, free to do as they pleased—and her husband ran with them. For her, just getting through the day had become a challenge.
I don’t know if my mother knew of Daddy’s many affairs, but everyone at the Lampoon did. The tryst my father had with Michael O’Donoghue’s girlfriend plunged the office into chaos, and the rift between the two men quickly became public. It wasn’t the first time Michael and my dad had shared a woman. It was just that this time, Michael was furious at what he saw as a betrayal. My father tried to smooth things over at first. In a letter he wrote to Michael that my mother showed me recently, he even came close to apologizing:
Michael
I have never done anything, at any time, for any reason that was intended to hurt you. There are few people I desire to hurt less. I never did and I never will.
I have never tried to elbow you out of the magazine (sic) or the record or any other project, and I never will. It would be suicidal.
I’m not enjoying all this one iota. It’s sad, poisonous and terribly unfunny. So please, let’s stop. I miss you.
Tony
Even in trying to apologize, it was all about my father—how he wasn’t enjoying the drama, how squeezing out Michael would’ve been suicidal for him. My mom believes Michael opened the letter, read it, and returned it without comment. Writing years later about the affair and subsequent falling-out, my father adopts a more indifferent tone: “Now in the hip-happening, going-too-far, nothing-is-sacred, dish-it-out world of the 1972 Lampoon, this sort of thing had happened once or twice before. . . . The line between loyalties and love were very indistinct, and claims on people made no sense.”
Maybe for him, but not for O’Donoghue, who demanded a complete, unequivocal apology from his former friend. “He seemed to be trying to will me to admit a wrong, a terrible wrong, an immeasurably terrible wrong and then die,” my father wrote later.
Michael should have known what I have come to accept: Admitting terrible wrongs is far beyond my father.
The situation escalated, the Lampoon offices divided, the adversaries avoided each other until, finally, a confrontation. According to my dad, Michael’s last words to him were: “You’re slime, Hendra. I hate you! You’re scum, you hear? Nothing but scum, slime!” My mother, however, was never one for showdowns. The affair, and in fact all the affairs, must have hurt her deeply. But she dealt with my father’s behavior by avoiding it. She didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to see. She didn’t want to hear. While the Lampoon offices were filled with high emotion, Mom stayed silent and absorbed the blows, as if she were on the seal’s end of that Lampoon photo shoot. My not wanting to go to school occupied the tiniest corner of her mind. So I remained inside my doll house and missed the last month and a half of first grade.
Kathy found my “illness” irritating. “You’re always getting to stay home, and I have to go to stupid school!” she yelled at me one evening as we fought over who got to sit closest to the tiny black-and-white television that my parents, with reservations, had finally purchased. They were, I suppose, ambivalent about television. My mother wasn’t interested in it, and my father regarded it as emblematic of the stupidity of American culture (perhaps because he had had no success writing for it). Once we had one, however, he got sucked in too. An insomniac, he often spent long nights glued to the tube. As a family, we watched Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Mom and Daddy had gone to Cambridge with almost the entire cast, and my father naturally had a professional interest in what was probably the most innovative comedy on television. Still, he couldn’t help but warn us of the terrible “brain rot” we would get from watching too much. And like many things my father said, suddenly this thing, this “brain rot,” concerned me. After an hour of Saturday morning cartoons, I worried I had caught it. When my mother read Kathy and me Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I was astounded to hear a whole song devoted to the ills of watching television.
I asked Mom if Daddy had written the book. “No,” she answered, “but I wish he had.”
Jockeying for the best spot on the bed to watch TV was just one of the squabbles Kathy and I had that spring. My special stay-at-home privileges did nothing to improve the already competitive relationship I had with my sister. We were so close in age that some fighting was inevitable. But it became more than just the normal sisterly button pushing. When we fought, I sensed that Kathy truly disliked me. She did all the things that siblings might do, twisting my wrist to give me an “Indian burn” or digging her nails into my arm until little reds marks appeared. But she did it with a gusto that made me think her anger was deeper than any mark she left. Kathy saw me as prettier, even though I always felt too awkward to be pretty, with my floating eye and pigeon toes. But to Kathy, thin defined pretty, and thin I was. She, however, was chubby, and my father made sure she knew it. When he wasn’t calling her “Thunder Thighs,” he made jokes about her “extra tires,” grinding her self-esteem to dust. Weight had always been a tremendous issue with my father, and the Lampoon years were his thin time. But he would go on and off diets and (when he wasn’t too hung over) made a point of working out. He equated fat to weakness, and despite her smarts and determination, Kathy was simply a fat kid to my dad. She assumed he preferred me because I wasn’t, and perhaps she was right. In the end, her weight might have been her best protection. Yes, she resented me. But she never knew the consequences of being Daddy’s girl.
When Henry Beard took over the Forge, he brought with him something that came to symbolize all that was wrong in my household: a croquet set. My parents and their friends saw it as a chance to exact revenge. It wasn’t so much about going from hoop to hoop. Instead, it became about the opportunity to smash another player’s ball far off into the bushes. And so rivalries, jealousies, and personal vendettas played out on our lawn.
Members of the Lampoon staff (and their assorted significant others) came to get away from the sweltering city and took full advantage of the nastiness of Henry’s croquet set. Kathy and I looked on while the adults became monsters. Matches routinely ended in cursing and tears. Forget what they taught us in school: that it didn’t matter whether you won or lost. For my parents and their friends, winning was everything, but how they won—and who they hurt along the way—meant even more.
I had seen this kind of game-playing before. Michael O’Donoghue had started it by bringing his Monopoly set to our house during the winter. He, my father, my mom, and sometimes one of Michael’s girlfriends used to sit up all night playing and smoking grass. Even from my room, I could hear the gleeful shouts as someone cleared someone else out. Sometimes they would get too tired or too stoned to play any longer, and they’d leave the game lying there, in mid-play. Kathy and I knew better than to disturb the Monopoly board in the morning.
But Michael no longer came to the house, given his feud with my father, and warm weather and croquet supplanted cold nights and Community Chest. If Kathy and I joined in a game, we were treated with some mercy, but only if it wasn’t too late in the afternoon. By evening, everyone was so drunk or so high that no one cared whose ball was sent skimming out in to the far reaches of the garden.
One evening, the croquet had gone on even later than usual. Lunch was a distant memory and dinner nowhere in sight. All the adults had been drinking since three in the afternoon, and the mood had grown nasty. Sean Kelly, a Lampoon editor, had brought his soft-spoken girlfriend, Valerie, to our house for the weekend. And in proper Hendra form, she was welcomed by becoming the croquet target of the afternoon. After her ball was sent off the course one too many times, Valerie finally crumbled.
Wielding her croquet mallet over her head, she ran toward the barn and began pounding it over and over again as tears of rage poured from her eyes. I watched Valerie’s delicate arms, as though in slow motion, swing the wooden mallet toward the wall with all her might, letting out the repressed frustrations amassed during a weekend with these ruthless satirists—men for whom a show of emotion was cause for ridicule, for whom the joke was always the most important thing.
I was fascinated by what she was doing. I fantasized that I was there next to her, banging my mallet against the barn, screaming and crying too. I didn’t know exactly why, what it was I wanted to scream out of my body, but I knew I felt something there. Now, of course, I realize it was confusion over what had happened with my father. I no longer felt safe. And I had begun to feel angry. I had just turned seven, but there wasn’t an adult around me who cared that I was a kid—or who had any idea that it mattered. But I didn’t run over and join Valerie. I knew that if I did everyone would only laugh at me, just like they were laughing at her.
That summer, for the first time since Heroin killed my parents’ friend, I became very aware of drugs. Sure, there had always been drugs around my family, but I began to make a real connection between what the grown-ups put into their bodies and the behavior that came out. I started to notice when the rolling paper appeared. Or when the coke was lined up on a mirror with a razor blade. The grown-ups would come and hover over whoever was setting up the drugs. The look in their eyes—the anticipation—reminded me of the look my father had showed me the night that he crawled into bed with me. And I would grow nervous. Why did they look like that? Why did it mean so much to them to pull smoke so deeply into their throats? And why were they sniffing white powder up their noses?
After the smoking and the snorting, the music would switch from Brahms to the Beatles, and the volume would rise. Meals were put on hold. Often, the group would gather along the river, where everyone would strip and plunge in naked. Kathy and I never did. We would stay behind in the house, running upstairs to change into our swimsuits before joining everyone by the water. No one told us to put on our suits; we just preferred it that way. In fact, we wanted everyone to wear one. Nude adults were supremely embarrassing, even to kids like Kathy and me, who had grown accustomed to having their parents walk around naked. In this upside-down world, my sister and I were the uptight and responsible ones, the square, boring guests who sat in the corner of the sofa while the hip people partied.
During these skinny-dipping sessions, I was especially concerned that our neighbors might walk by. It was easy to see the stream from the road. Just a few low trees and bushes could obscure a direct view of the Hendras and their pals—and all their private parts—from the eyes of anyone taking an afternoon stroll. It wasn’t as if the stoned and naked grownups were quiet, either. They splashed and giggled and cursed almost as much as they did while playing croquet.
I sat on a rock one afternoon, watching the red glow on the end of the joint that was making its way around the group, when I heard the familiar voices of Becky and Jeremy Bradford. They were closing on us fast, so I knew they must be on their bikes. I scurried up the river bank and looked down the road. To my horror, they weren’t alone. Walking behind the bikes were their mom and dad! Doug wore a white T-shirt and jeans, Connie a sleeveless, blue shirt and matching Bermuda shorts. They had clothes on and just plain old regular cigarettes between their fingers. And every step brought them closer to the spot where they would be able to see my parents sprawled out on the river rocks—naked, naked, naked with all their naked, naked friends. The bright summer sunshine streamed down like a spotlight, highlighting the sets of protruding breasts, the shocks of pubic hair, and—most disturbing to me—the dangling penises. They would see it all. There was no way they would just walk by. How could they with all the racket going on? Inside my head I was screaming, Shut up! Shut up! All of you shut up! But the splashing and cursing only seemed to grow louder. I began to pray: Please, Lord, don’t let the Bradfords see us. Please, oh please, don’t let the Bradfords see us. . . .