By the time Fritz left for college, my sense of obligation to either of my parents had worn thin. The task of negotiating the difficulties of adolescence on top of the strange dynamics between my divorced parents (she hated him but couldn’t let go of her feelings; he wouldn’t say a word against her and withstood her diatribes against him like a stoic who had it coming); the worsening of Dad’s alcoholism; my mother’s intractable depression; and my regular and increasingly debilitating asthma attacks together wore me out.
These beats became the background noise of my life, like a repeating Flintstones backdrop—house, rock, dinosaur. If you wait long enough, another one will come streaming by. The only way I could control the cadence was to avoid my parents as much as possible.
When Dad had recovered sufficiently from his surgery, my grandfather, perhaps as a way to derail any other plans Dad might have had, told him he needed to start working again and offered him a job at Trump Management. Donald had moved to an office in Manhattan, so Dad considered it. But it turned out the job being offered wasn’t in the office on Avenue Z. Instead, it was a job working on a maintenance crew at Trump Village, the same development whose construction sixteen years earlier, in 1963, had prompted Dad to quit Trump Management and become a professional pilot. Dad spent his days stripping paint, raking leaves, or fixing broken toilets—all things he’d done during summers working for Trump Management when he was in high school.
The job humiliated him, and that, of course, was the point as far as my grandfather was concerned—that’s what made it enjoyable, seeing his oldest son so dependent and beaten down that he would take the scraps and be grateful for them. Dad didn’t say anything to me about it one way or the other. But that’s when he started drinking and smoking again.
I stayed away from home even on the weekends now that my brother wasn’t around to tell me what to do. It wasn’t only the oppressive silence or the walking on eggshells; I’d learned that after my mother told me to get in bed next to her when I had an asthma attack, and I sat up waiting for the sun to rise until she finally took me to the hospital, she was awake the whole time.
“Every time she takes a breath, the bed shakes,” she told a friend during a lunch we were having at the Bloomingdale’s café, as if that were a feat to marvel at instead of a reality that should have spurred her into action.
Now when I went into my mother’s room—when the rescue inhaler had failed yet again—I didn’t even bother to wake her up; I simply took my place in the bed next to her and left her undisturbed. When she woke up in the morning, she’d know immediately that it was time to take me to the hospital. It saved me the trouble of being reminded yet again that she didn’t care enough to do anything.
I got up earlier and earlier on the weekdays, in part because my friends and I started meeting at the candy store at six thirty, but also because I needed at least half an hour to comb the knots out of my hair, which I’d finally figured out how to do. It was one small way to make sophomore year slightly less horrible. Whatever energy I had left went to keeping up the pretense that I was on top of things, that I was in control, while denying that life was shifting into the terrifying and shaky realm of rivalry, misunderstanding, conflict, and insecurity from which I’d been almost entirely immune before high school.
I spent inordinate amounts of time dreaming about camp, writing letters to my camp friends, and counting down the days until we drove to Brewster for opening day. Over the years, mostly because of camp, I’d developed a certain level of self-confidence, and I could no longer back it up. The distance between me and my friends had been growing for years because of the secrets I had to keep. Most of the time I felt utterly alone.