Almost every Sunday, my grandfather sent his dark blue Cadillac limousine to pick my brother and me up for Sunday breakfast at the House. We waited on the sidewalk across the street from the Highlander so Ed, the chauffeur, didn’t have to make a U-turn. When he pulled up to the curb, Fritz and I, dressed in our sneakers and jeans and T-shirts, jumped in.
On Saturdays, before I was old enough to join him, my brother often rode his bike to our cousin David’s apartment in Jamaica Estates or to the House, where the two of them met our uncle Rob to play soccer. If my mother wasn’t around to give me a ride, I got stuck at home.
I wanted to have the kind of freedom Fritz had; if I could ride to my grandparents’ house under my own steam, he wouldn’t so easily be able to leave me behind. But the main reason I had wanted the training wheels off my bike was so I wouldn’t have to ride in my grandfather’s limo anymore. If any of my neighborhood friends was around to see Ed arrive, I felt self-conscious. It embarrassed me, sitting in the back seat of that pretentious Cadillac, but also, deep down, it made me feel superior, which embarrassed me to the point of shame. And that made me feel like I didn’t belong anywhere.
I spent a lot of time practicing on the two-wheeler in the flat expanse of the Belcrest parking lot or along the cement path that ringed the pond. The Raleigh, heavy and unwieldy, made it difficult to negotiate the many hills in the neighborhood, so I often ended up having to dismount when my legs gave out and the bike threatened to tip over. I probably pushed that bike more than I rode it.
I finally convinced my parents to let me trade in the Raleigh for a Schwinn, complete with sissy bar, sparkling blue banana seat, and low-slung handlebars. After that, my friends and I rode everywhere, even those places that were tacitly forbidden to us, like the road that bordered the dark, overgrown back corner of the park. We’d lean our bikes against the parking meters outside the candy store that stood in a solitary block of small businesses, drink a vanilla soda from the fountain, and then leave with a handful of Bazooka bubble gum at two for a penny before riding down the desolate street that wound past the edge of the thick stand of oak trees at the perpetually dark corner of the park across from Jamaica High School.
To get to the House, it was a straight shot down Highland Avenue until it dead-ended at Homelawn Street, the border between Jamaica and Jamaica Estates. Getting across Homelawn to Henley Road, which wound through the west part of the neighborhood all the way to Midland Parkway, the town’s main thoroughfare, required taking a sharp left turn, cutting across oncoming traffic, and powering up a short, steep stretch of road before taking the right onto Henley.
My grandparents’ house, a lopsided Georgian with an off-center portico held up by six massive Corinthian columns, loomed on top of another steep hill. My grandfather had a fabricated family crest and Latin motto inscribed on the pediment. Nobody knew what the motto stood for, although my father suggested it might be “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter.”
Every time we visited (other than Thanksgiving and Christmas, when we climbed the wide flagstone steps to the front door) we left our bikes on the driveway next to the garage door and took a narrow cement pathway to the back door.
When it wasn’t raining, we played soccer or threw a baseball around, depending on which of our uncles was there. Rob was the soccer player—he’d been on Boston University’s team as an undergrad. He was good and I wanted to learn from him, but, as the youngest by far and the only girl, I usually ended up being the monkey in the middle.
It didn’t take long to realize that Donald couldn’t do much more than throw a baseball, which he did, as hard as he could, at his niece and nephews, who were all under ten. For my eighth birthday, Fritz got me a catcher’s mitt. This mitt, which looked like something a major league catcher would own, had glossy tobacco leather and two-inch padding. Eventually, I realized he’d bought me the glove to protect my hand bones from Donald’s fastball. Luckily for us, Donald usually missed his target, but when he did connect, the impact reverberated all the way up my arm. The boys were undoubtedly waiting for the day when they were old enough and strong enough to turn the tables on him, although he would, of course, stop playing catch with them long before that could happen.
I did my best to keep up, but the last straw was when Rob started using me for target practice. I loved Rob, partially because he was younger and not above hanging out with us. He took us for rides in his red convertible and we went to Burger King and Nino’s, the pizza place on the corner of Midland Parkway and Hillside Avenue. He also seemed the most human of them; I thought he was different.
I had a tendency to get styes when I was young, and one weekend I showed up with the worst one I’d ever had; my left eye was almost completely swollen shut. Rob joked that it would be simpler if he kicked the ball into my face to deflate it. We all laughed. When we started playing the game, Rob and I were on the same team. I waved my arms and yelled for him to pass me the ball. He stopped. I couldn’t have been more than fifteen feet away, but he approached the soccer ball as if he were teeing up a thirty-yard penalty kick. When his foot made contact with the ball, it sounded like a thunderclap. The ball hit squarely on my eye, and when my head snapped back, I heard, rather than felt, the explosion as I was knocked to the ground. I looked up through my right eye and saw my brother rushing toward me with a terrified look on his face. I couldn’t open my left eye at all, and that whole side of my face was sticky and wet.
As Fritz helped me into the House, Rob, who hadn’t moved, called after me, “Sorry, honeybunch. Bet that feels better though.” I knew then, as if there had been any question, that he’d done it on purpose—he was too good a player for it to have been an accident. If it had been Fritz or David, I would have taken it in stride—it also wouldn’t have hurt so much. But Robert was twenty-six years old. After that, whenever either of my uncles was around, I kept to myself.
My aunts Maryanne and Elizabeth usually spent those Saturday mornings and afternoons with my grandmother in the kitchen. Gam and Liz sat at a small chrome-and-tile table that jutted out from the wall next to the refrigerator like something you’d see in a 1950s-era diner, while Maryanne, in her tweed skirt, sweater, and low heels, leaned against the counter by a window that looked out onto the backyard—maybe to make sure Donald or Robert wasn’t trying to break any of David’s bones.
It would have been like me to try to insert myself into their conversation, like a kid jumping double Dutch looking for just the right opening, but their conversations never skipped a beat and there was no room for me. If they’d been in the library, with everybody sitting down, I wouldn’t have minded listening in silence to their chatter. We could have gone out to lunch or gone shopping, but nobody ever suggested it. Standing in the middle of the kitchen felt awkward, so I left to find somewhere else to be.
It was during those long days in the House, with the boys playing games that excluded me and the women chatting in the kitchen about things that didn’t concern me, that I started to turn inward. There were always people around, but we seemed never to make an impression on one another—or I didn’t make an impression on them—so, instead, I wandered through the rooms of that big, empty house looking for somewhere to be alone.
Liz had not only the best bedroom, but the best room in the House—a spacious, sun-filled corner room, with a bay window overlooking the backyard. Given Liz’s position in the family—the middle child, the younger girl, too young to have grown up close with Maryanne and Freddy and too old to relate to Donald and Robert—this always surprised me. I wondered if my grandfather had assigned the rooms on purpose, but then I realized the man simply didn’t understand how space worked, given the bizarre asymmetry of the House, the design of which he oversaw and which he’d had built from scratch, and its lack of formal elegance. Once Fred had relegated Freddy, his heir apparent, to the Cell, he probably didn’t care where his other kids slept. Liz had simply gotten lucky. Even though she had a full-time job at Chase Manhattan and her own apartment, a grim one-bedroom on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, with a western exposure blocked by a taller building across the street, she came to the House almost every weekend. She seemed to have no social life and maintained an unhealthy dependence on my grandparents until she got married, for the first time, in 1989, at the age of forty-seven. (Her dependence on Maryanne never waned. She even changed her will at Maryanne’s instruction because, according to Maryanne, “If it weren’t for me, Elizabeth would have left everything to a cat shelter or some bullshit.” Liz had no children, so one can only imagine whom Maryanne might have recommended as a beneficiary.)
I loved hiding out in her room, and sometimes I dared to curl up on her bed. Usually, I sat on the floor and leaned against it or lay in a patch of sun by the window reading her magazines.
There were three transistor radios in the House—one in Dad’s Cell, the second in Maryanne’s bedroom, an uninviting square that looked like a room at an extended-stay business hotel, and the third in the kitchen, all always tuned to AM news or talk radio. Liz had a cassette player and cassettes—hers was the only room in the House with music.
When I was nine, she added Neil Diamond’s His 12 Greatest Hits to her collection. I knew his music from the radio and the jukebox at Dante’s, the Italian restaurant we went to with Dad a couple of times a month, but those were only a handful of singles. I’d never heard “Shilo” or “Brooklyn Roads” before, and I began to wish Liz wouldn’t be at the House when I came by so I could listen to the tape, flipping the cassette back to the A-side when “Brooklyn Roads” ended, until it was time to leave. If she was around, I had to find somewhere else to go. Even if she was downstairs with Gam and Maryanne, I wouldn’t have dared go to her room. It never occurred to me to ask if I could hang out in her room with her, just as it never occurred to her to invite me in, let me sit next to her on the floor sharing her popcorn, flipping through magazines, and listening to music.
I eventually stole the cassette from her. I knew it was wrong, but I wanted to be able to listen to it all the time. I could have asked my mother to buy it for me, or I could have used my allowance to buy it for myself, but neither of those things occurred to me, either.
My grandfather was rarely home on Saturdays, so even if Liz was camped out in her room, I still had options. When I was little, I sometimes sneaked into the foyer coat closet and shut the door behind me. My grandmother kept her fur coats there, and my grandfather’s collection of hats, each carefully blocked within its own box, lined the shelves along three of the walls. The ceiling was at least twelve feet high, and after rolling around in the fur coats, I pulled out the stepladder and took down one of the hat boxes from the lower shelf, something I never would have done if my grandfather had been home. There was a mirror attached to the door that folded out so you could see yourself from three different angles. After I put the hat on my head and adjusted it so it didn’t completely cover my face, I struck poses like a gangster.
Eventually I got tired of the smell of mothballs and the worry that I might get caught.
My grandparents’ bedroom, a cool, large space two steps down from the upstairs hallway and directly above the living room, had the same floor plan and low-pile taupe carpeting. I tiptoed over the open floor between the door and the bed with trepidation, as if it were so many miles of enemy territory.
Gam’s dressing room, an antechamber to the master bathroom, was far away from the door, but that was a destination worth taking risks to get to. There was a built-in vanity on either side where Gam kept her makeup and toiletries. Her perfumes, intricately carved bottles of cobalt and emerald and bordeaux, were arrayed in formation, the smallest in front. An enormous lead crystal bottle of Chanel No. 5 was set off to one side. I sat on the tufted ottoman and chose a bottle at random, brushing the stopper lightly against my wrists. The opposing walls were covered with mirrors that reached to the ceiling, reflecting off each other and creating an infinite sequence of images. There were so many of me, each copy diminishing in size as they receded until I got lost trying to find the point just beyond perception, mesmerized by the way space seemed to unfold in the absence of space.
Sometimes I stayed there so long, I wonder if anybody thought to look for me or if they had even noticed I was missing.
The air in the House was inert, as if nobody had ever lived there at all, but I staked out these out-of-the-way spaces, no matter how dark or small, and imbued them with comfort and mystery. I could disappear into them, imagine them as wondrous, faraway empires.
As I grew older, being on my own at Gam’s vanity, or in Liz’s room, or in the basement where my grandfather’s life-size Indian chief humidors loomed in the shadows, started to feel transgressive, as if I were breaking an unspoken rule and doing something indefinably wrong. The comfort began to bleed away and the mystery became tinged with dread, as if the rooms and closets and out-of-the-way corners were off limits and I was crossing a line nobody had actually drawn. Increasingly, an inchoate threat hovered over those safe spaces where I could be myself, spaces that got chipped away and chipped away until there was nowhere left, until I felt like I didn’t even belong in my own skin. I couldn’t define the potential consequences of being “caught” (just as I couldn’t define what being caught even meant), I just knew that there would be consequences. I had somehow intuited what it was like to be my father growing up in that house. I was finally becoming conscious of something I’d known, at least on some level, all along—there was no way for me to fit into this family.