My mother is up more and more, mostly to make trips in the Volkswagen bus to a shady establishment, in my opinion, on the outskirts of the city, a closet-size room lined with crates and a sawdust-covered floor that she calls the health food store. She slides the door of the Volkswagen open for the volunteers—this health food store is a co-op—all wearing aprons over their street clothes, to load in the food she has purchased: oatmeal-ish brick-hard dollops trying to pass themselves off as cookies; bags of dried apricots, two kinds—one shriveled and brown, the other plump and apricot-like, and apparently the plump version is the treat because the sulfur used to prevent the shrivel isn’t good for us; twiglike sticks lumpy with sesame seeds—my mother calls them sesame sticks, and she’s glowing as if they are the most exciting thing she has ever seen; unsweetened square peels of fruit leather—raspberry, grape, cherry, all the same color brown—all packed in the cardboard boxes we will be bringing these items home in.
There is nowhere for me to hang my legs as we drive back through the streets of New York to the Dakota. I busy myself by looking up into the windows of the apartments we pass, imagining myself living inside the rooms I catch glimpses of, playing my game: How close can I get to seeing, in my mind’s eye, inside the seedy rooms with stained, torn curtains and not lose myself in that sadness? In the apartments we pass where the windows are clean and the lights glow velvety warm, I imagine soft rugs and oversize couches and chairs, lamps throwing golden halos that envelop and cheer, and feel my old tinge of envy.
When we reach the Dakota, my mother drives up the curb, without hesitation, into the arched entrance, and I am reminded that she has told us how she started driving when she was nine in her father’s pastures and often scoffs at women drivers on the roads around us: Most women can’t drive. She stops the perfect distance, just feet from the gates. Once, we arrived to several police cars and my father pacing out front. My father had called the NYPD because we had been gone so long.
“Where have you been, Carol?” His voice was high-pitched as I climbed over the boxes and out of the car. He, as usual, didn’t seem to care that people, passing on the street, were staring.
“I was shopping, Edgar.” My mother’s voice remained calm as she turned to survey her cargo. Her hair fell loose and soft around her face, dressed in her favorite outfit of late, jeans and a sweatshirt; she seemed very capable and in charge again.
Now she hauls off the box on top, which is filled with cartons of unfertilized eggs, glass bottles of raw milk, and bags filled with rings of dried pineapple, and hands it to Heinz. She carries the next box herself and a service worker, who Heinz has radioed for help, grabs the third. The three of them make trips back and forth until all the boxes are stacked in our kitchen. Then my mother backs up the Volkswagen and pulls it around to the ramp under my bedroom window, which leads down to the garage under the building.
* * *
“Isn’t she pretty?” my father asks. I am standing at his side, looking up at Cybill Shepherd. She is a towering princess, glittery, blond, shiny. We are in Miami for a week; my father is filming The Heartbreak Kid. He has brought Greg and me to the set. Jay and Braddy are too young to be unattended, so they are at the condo with my mother, but Greg and I get to hang out all day. It’s morning and we have just arrived. Every tourist in the hotel knows a movie is being filmed, and as we walk through the lobby, all eyes are on us. It’s fun to feel this important. In between shots, we explore the pool deck and ride the elevators. I feel coated in sweat and grime in the same way I used to after a Saturday cooped up in the Dakota, but here I feel privileged and happy.
“Quiet on the set,” calls a woman holding a walkie-talkie.
Standing in the hall outside the hotel room where the scene with Charles Grodin and Jeannie Berlin is being filmed, Greg and I duck the hot lights and straddle the thick black snakelike cables that no one seems worried we will step on accidentally. I make myself still so no one will ask me to leave. There are electricians and assistants and makeup people hovering in the hall; the closest we can get is just outside the doorway. I can’t see into the room where the scene is being shot, but I can listen. At home, I’m good at being quiet, good at being in a room without taking up any space, a skill my brothers and I hone when the tension around our father feels like it is at a breaking point. This scene—in which Jeannie Berlin has a sunburn and wears smeared-in cold cream and lies in bed while Charles Grodin paces—has been filmed over and over, which is just fine by me. Cordoned off, we are in; most of the gawking world is out. I love the long day, bored and in sticky, sweaty love with everything around me. This is so much better than real life.
After a week, when the shooting is finished and we are back in New York, my father brings me to the cutting room, where he oversees and Elaine May edits. The small room is filled with her cigarette smoke. Twenty-three stories below us taxis and cars honk and red taillights light up the night. I am a fly on the wall and I soak in the banter between them, Elaine May’s crackling charisma, the sense I have that we are high above the rest of humanity, literally and figuratively, this rarified world my father is a part of.
* * *
My parents have announced that we are moving to Long Island to get away from the city air. Plandome is close enough to the city that my father can take the Long Island Railroad in each day. My mother has found a house suited to her antique furniture, built around the same time as the Dakota—in the 1800s. My mother is proud she has found a suburban environment that matches the architectural splendor of the Dakota. She has floor plans drawn up on dining room table–size sheets of tracing paper that lay out the dimensions and location of every piece of furniture as they sit in the formal rooms of our Dakota apartment so the layout can be recreated in the new rooms of the Plandome house. An appraiser generates a list of every item being transferred. Pages upon pages list tables of inlaid wood, lamps and sconces, urns and vases and fire screens and mirrors, ivory busts and bronze figures; sofas, loveseats, and chairs made of damask and silk and velvet, from the French Empire, Victorian, Chinese Chippendale, and Renaissance periods. Like those in the Dakota, the rooms in this new house loom; they are made of dark, formal wood paneling higher than my head throughout, and dark wood floors. Also like the Dakota, our new house has a name. I find a stone plaque under the ivy in the front: SHORE GABLES. Our neighbors’ houses around ours, my mother tells me, were once part of what had been a large estate. The neighbor to our right lives in the house that was our Japanese gardens. To the left, our neighbor lives in the stables. I wonder if it suits my mother that we are once again in the most exclusive house; though, as far as I’m concerned, this house disappoints. Here’s our chance to live in the country, and our yard is a sliver of grass in the back. Whoever partitioned off the estate was concerned, as my parents are, with house over yard. I’m wanting wildness. My favorite books are The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew and Heidi, books about poor children surrounded by nature.
I attend Manhasset Middle School, where an entire culture I knew nothing about has been thriving: belly-button shirts, bell-bottom pants, platform shoes. The day I finally give in and wear what everyone else is wearing, a previously standoffish classmate says, “You look nice today, Chris.” Only I know I’m wearing a costume. There are drugs here, as well as a subculture of bused-in black students of lower socioeconomic status. I am stabbed with a needle one morning while at my gym locker, a hot, sharp pain, all the more of a shock because I feel as alienated as these bused-in kids do; the needle feels like not just an affront, but a betrayal. In another hallway filled with all-white students, someone thwacks my training bra. Michael Murtag, who lives two houses down, is in my French class. He’s popular and I’m not, but I imagine a quiet connection even so. An unspoken understanding that beneath it all there is some kindredness, at least based on our shared address. I am walking beside the row of desks in class, the bell has rung, I’m heading for my seat. Michael bounces in, shifting his weight left and right as he waits for me to move so he can get to his usual desk at the back of the class.
“Get out of the way, dog,” he says, then pushes past me, bumping me hard with his shoulder.
The morning after Michael Murtag’s insult, my father pulls up in front of school and leaves the engine idling. I don’t open the car door. Hot tears prick the backs of my eyes, and I rub my nose. I can’t go back in there. Into that world where I am special to no one.
“I don’t like it here,” I say.
I’m crying, which is not good. My eyes will be red. I’ll be prone to more tears if even something minor happens. But I know I have no choice. There is no plan B in place. My father is patient, but he has to make his train. He believes I will adjust to the Plandome schools, which is the reason he chose this town.
* * *
It’s Saturday and I wander outside. In the next yard over, I pull myself up onto the first branch of a tree I’ve named Elsa. The bark is white with black thumbnail-shaped smiles, cold and hard under my palms, wrinkled like elephant skin. The grass belonging to my neighbors, people whose names I will never know, is brown and furry, dormant already in October. There are no leaves on any trees, and the sky is colorless though it’s only noon. Past a copse that dips then rises into our side yard, is the large kitchen window of our new house. The cold sky is reflected in the picture window; I can’t see anyone inside. No one is outside. I reach up and climb to the second branch. How high can I go? The branches of this tree are splayed like rungs waiting for me to use them. Breathing hard feels good. I reach and step, reach and step, and each branch takes me higher. I stop three rungs from the top—the remaining branches are too thin to hold me—and look around. I’m very high. The air feels thinner up here; the neighborhood is laid out below me. I feel powerful, capable. It’s too bad that I’ll have to climb down, that it’s cold up here and I’m holding on for dear life. There is nothing I want, nothing I would have chosen for myself, down there.
* * *
My father unwraps the steak. It is the size of a violin. The butcher paper has been folded over many times and taped. He lifts the steak free of the paper, deep red, edged and marbled with white fat, which I imagine crispy and glistening, salty and hot, after it is barbecued. Though it’s morning and I have to wait all day.
“Look, Christine.”
He unwraps a second package. Pink ground meat flecked with white speckles of fat. He pours soy sauce on it and sprinkles way too much salt.
“Steak tartar.”
I think of the rhymes he has taught me: Jack Sprat could eat no fat. His wife could eat no lean. And so between them both, you see, they licked the platter clean. And One man’s meat is another man’s poison. He smacks his lips with his fingers the way he does when he is happy about what he is about to eat, and eats one forkful, then another. He doesn’t offer this to me, luckily, because I can see steak tartar is a fancy name for what is clearly only raw hamburger.
* * *
I want to get into the spirit of Thanksgiving in our Plandome house. I ask my mom to sew me a Pilgrim costume. I bring the turkey in on its platter, very heavy, set it down. Brown juices run in rivulets along the platter’s grooves. We sit as a family at the long dining room table, which is filled with traditional Thanksgiving dishes. Sweet potatoes, stuffing, salad, and turkey.
It’s the day after Thanksgiving, and my father is on a rampage at the top of the grand staircase. He’s holding an armful of vitamin bottles and throwing them onto the entryway below. The first bottle smashes, shattering into a thousand shards, and vitamins spill across the cool stone, the sound like a sudden downpour of rain.
“How. Many. Vitamin. Bottles. Are. We. Going. To. Allow. To. Accumulate? We’re all drowning in vitamin bottles, Carol. Can you see we’re drowning?” He throws another bottle. Pills rain across the floor.
I am hiding in the room my mother calls the powder room, a tiny bathroom on the first floor with one small stained-glass window out of sight of where my father stands. I want to leave, but I don’t want to be seen.
My mother screams back at him from the kitchen, “No one understands the role of nutrition in health, Edgar!”
He roars his favorite response: “The. Greatest. Scientific. Minds. In. The. World. Don’t. Know. The. Cure. To. Cancer. And. You. Do?”
Another bottle shatters. Then another. Now footsteps—it sounds like he’s coming down the staircase. I need to get away. My heart is pounding as I slip out of the powder room and head for the front door. The going is treacherous: shattered glass and vitamins cover the entryway. They have spilled into the formal rooms and even cover the rug in the study. I slide with each step like I’m on ice. I make it to the front door, open it, close it behind me. I run, duck down into our backyard, crouch in the bushes, where no one will know I am.