“What do you want?” my mother asks.
It’s a week after my father’s last tirade and things have settled down. I’m looking through the pantry in the Plandome kitchen for something good to eat. The shelves are filled with unfamiliar bags and plastic packages. I’m not seeing any of our old staples: Chips Ahoy!, Ritz Crackers, Cap’n Crunch. She’s obviously been replacing things when no one was looking.
“We have sesame sticks. We have dried apricots. I got carob-coated peanut clusters yesterday,” she calls from the sink.
I pick up a brown loaf of bread that, in my opinion, shouldn’t even be called bread. The slices are thick and hard, and they don’t bend; instead they break at the slightest pressure. I lift the jar of peanut butter. It’s heavy in my hand, greasy under the lid though it’s yet to be opened. I see the telltale thick, oily yellow layer at the top that signals healthy peanut butter. Though my mother will cheerfully open the jar and mix the contents with a knife, the density and oiliness will remain. This oily peanut butter can satisfy in a pinch—I mix it with honey and spread it on the unbendable bread—but it’s never what I really want. The cookies she buys are brownish-gray lumps that taste like they look: too hard, barely sweet, a mixture of strange flavorings, heavy on the orange peel. The first moment when tooth and tongue connect with a carob chip, I can’t suppress the hope that springs eternal—maybe it’s secretly chocolate? Maybe chips changed hands and, unknowingly, carob chips were swapped for chocolate ones? But once I bite in, my hopes are dashed. My mother says chocolate is a toxin and stays in the body long after we eat it, so the cookies in our pantry these days are always carob.
She sees me pick up a baggie filled with carob-covered peanut clusters.
“Try the carob! It’s delicious,” she sings as if I have never had carob before.
I decide to give carob another try. Maybe this time I’ll like it. I know I asked myself this the last time I tried the carob my mother brought home, but have I ever really noticed how much it looks like chocolate? I open the bag and breathe in the aroma. I have asked myself this question, too, but would I be able to tell a difference if I didn’t know? I reach in for a cluster, put it in my mouth. Glossy, chocolate-like coating, check. Maybe if I keep an open mind, this time the carob could be enough to vanquish this constant longing I feel for chocolate so I can be left in peace. And indeed, the coating starts to melt on my tongue and teeth in a chocolaty way. I chew that cluster and take another, though with the second cluster the fruity un-chocolate taste is suddenly more noticeable. Hopefully, I’m also just imagining that the dried-fruit taste is giving me the beginnings of a headache. I push on, chew a third.
Please let me like it.
The fruit taste has drowned out any semblance to chocolate now and I’m definitely queasy. This is how carob made me feel the last time, I suddenly remember. My temples have begun to throb. I put the half-eaten cluster back in the bag.
“Good?” my mother says.
Whatever I love about chocolate, it’s clearly about more than look and texture. As much as I wish it could be, it’s not easily replaced. My mother says chocolate is bad for me and I know she will never buy it again. Carob is a false hope, a tease like everything else in this pantry.
* * *
My mother has set four supplements on the table. The glasses are tall, the glass thick but not thick enough to hide what sits waiting. One tall, fat glass of tomato juice mixed with three heaping tablespoons of brewers’ yeast flakes and three tablespoons of desiccated liver powder. Slices of orange wait beside each in a saucer.
“Supplement time!” my mother calls from the kitchen.
We are living in Southold, Long Island, in a rental house on a little bay, while my father films Law and Disorder, a movie with Ernest Borgnine and Carroll O’Connor. On the weekends, when my father is home, he shows us how to wade out in the sound to our knees then stick our arms into the mud to our elbows and pull up cherrystone clams. We fill our buckets and then he pries them open with a butter knife. We slurp the pulpy bodies, chewy knobs of muscle, swallow the bitter, salty juices. He shows us how to squeeze the lemon; the lemon makes the whole procedure more like eating and less like murder.
It’s morning. My brothers and I file in around the table, cracking jokes in a whisper about excusing ourselves to go to the bathroom and dumping the contents of our glasses in the toilet or calling the dog and tricking her into consuming all four supplements, as we turn the full glasses around in our hands, working up the nerve for those first swallows.
“Just drink it down,” my mother says firmly from the sink. We’ve been stalling for twenty minutes.
“You’re just letting it get warm,” my mother says. “May as well get it down, get on with the day.”
What would be the harm in sitting here all day with this glass in front of me? But Greg takes a deep breath, lifts his glass, and begins. Braddy follows. I don’t want to be last; plus, as awful as a supplement is to drink when it’s cold, it’s worse when it’s warm. I hold my breath, lift the glass to my lips, and take my first swallow as Jay does the same. It’s as bad as I expect: thick, warm sludge, more solid than liquid. I suck down the first, then another grainy swallow, already feeling the need for air. By the third gulp, my lungs are burning. Finally it’s unavoidable; I have to breathe, but as I do, also unavoidable, there’s the rushing in of taste, raw liver mostly. I slam my glass, only half finished, down onto the table as my brothers do the same.
“Eat your orange slices! Your orange slices!” My mother rushes from the sink and, one by one, slides each of our saucers of orange slices to us. I bite down. The cool sweetness helps but doesn’t drown out the dead brown taste of yeast and liver now coating the roof of my mouth and that seems permanently lodged in my sinuses.
Half a glass left. None of us make jokes now. Bubble pockets of powder pop as I chug, small detonations of pure liver and yeast, spraying my tongue and the back of my throat. Four more swallows in, the Coke-rim bottom of my glass appears, streams of thick, pulpy red flecked with brown and yellow clinging to the sides. Done. I slam my glass to the table. My brothers do the same, panting and sucking our final orange slices, breathing through our noses until the last bit of orange pulp is ripped from the rind and the overpowering taste of liver and yeast rushes in.
* * *
I come home from eighth grade at Manhasset Middle School to find my mother pacing in the Plandome house. She is crossing from the sunroom on one side of her bedroom, striding across the expanse of cold rugless hardwood floor—my mother is still allergic to dust and there are no carpets in this house—heading for the matching sunroom on the other side of the room. I love these sunrooms. They are filled with light and the windows and the walls and windowpanes are painted white. All the other rooms in this too-big house of thirty-six rooms are made of dark wood paneling; dark, towering staircases; dark brown tile; cold wooden floors. If, God forbid, I am sent on an errand into the basement, a maze of silent, empty chambers, the largest of which my mother calls the rathskeller—a ballroom-size room that we are using for storage since this house was built before cars and there is no garage—the hair on the back of my neck prickles sharp pinpoints before I am even halfway to the bottom of the staircase. I am afraid down here. It feels like whatever we all try to avoid on the upper floors, with their windows and views to the yard, has been concentrated into these shut-off, silent rooms. As if the weight of the upper, empty house has compressed the very air into something solid. Another kind of darkness lurks down here, mingled almost gleefully with the shadows. A darkness we will never as a family talk about. Still, I will myself to walk, to not lose my composure, as if sprinting will weaken the force field of protection around me, an admission of vulnerability to the powers that be. But I will never complete a mission in this basement without ultimately running for my life, twisting through the cold, dark rooms, leaping the stairs in threes, wind whistling in my hair, gasping for breath, tumbling into daylight.
“I’ll be okay,” she says as she passes me, heading back across to the other sunroom again. I am still standing in the middle of her bedroom. She doesn’t look at me as she goes by. I realize that she doesn’t seem to be looking at anything. I feel a twinge, a hot needle begin in the softest part of my stomach. I consider the time. My father is on his way home from work in the city, out of reach. My brothers are off on their bikes somewhere in the neighborhood.
My mother heads for the bathroom. “The coffee enemas are helping,” she says.
Coffee enemas?
By the toilet a small rubber bag hangs from a wire coat hanger. A thin white hose with a nozzle at the end dangles from the bag. It looks like something that belongs in a hospital a hundred years ago, not here in this bathroom. She wants to give herself another enema, she says. She says she has eaten something, she isn’t sure what, and felt a reaction coming on. But the enemas are helping her purge the offending substance.
“Go on, Christine. I’ll be fine.”
I immerse myself in my American history homework. After forty minutes it occurs to me that it’s very quiet in her bedroom, which is next to mine, just down the hall.
Her bedroom seems so still as I approach.
“Mom?”
I peek in. For a second it seems the room is empty, but then I look over at the bed. She is lying, covers drawn up to her chin, staring at the ceiling.
“Mom!”
I expect her to look at me, but she doesn’t. Her eyes don’t waver from the ceiling. I notice her arms are shaking. I realize she is shaking all over, her legs and feet through the covers. Her torso and shoulders.
“Mom! Mom?”
I pick up the phone, dial my father’s office. His secretary, still in the office, calls an ambulance.
* * *
My mother’s hospital room is dark. On the single gurney I see a thin tangle of sheets. As my father and I walk closer, I realize my mother is lying under them, so small and suddenly shrunken, I don’t notice her at first.
“A half hour later and it would have been too late,” the doctor tells my father. Too many enemas caused the sodium in my mother’s body to become diluted. Her body’s water levels rose, and her cells began to swell.
“It’s possible to drown from the inside,” the doctor says.
* * *
My mother has been home from the hospital for two months. Neither my father nor my mother talks about the hospital or the enemas. She got home and began taking care of us as if nothing had happened. We are spending the summer in Connecticut while my father films The Stepford Wives. Greg and I get to spend the days at the set. Jay and Braddy stay home with our mother. The morning is still crisp and cool. My brother and I come together, each other’s touchstones, then move off again, like explorers, to see what will come our way. The foyer of the house the movie crew is using for this week’s location is an obstacle course of tarps laid over python-thick black cables, sheets of Visqueen, panels of plywood, lights waiting to be turned on perched on man-size tripods. I mosey over to the makeup trailer, then past the unneeded-for-now teamsters; they have pulled fold-out chairs in a circle for a chat and a cigarette, their hoarse, phlegmy laughter rising with the smoke. One teamster, nicknamed Fast Eddie, with a combed-back black ducktail and a cigarette pack rolled up in his black T-shirt, drives us back and forth from our rented ivy-covered tree house in the woods to wherever the set is—the rainy neighborhood street corner, the tidy white-shingled house, the marshy field—for that day. There’s a lot of waiting on a set, more waiting than I’ve ever known—waiting for makeup, waiting for electricians, and, after a take, waiting as the scene is played back to see if the director, Bryan Forbes, his gentle touch on my shoulder and pastel voice matching the drape of his soft oatmeal-colored linen suits, his pink, sky-blue, and Easter-egg-yellow chemises, wants another take. I’m not exactly sure of the time, another phenomenon that’s new. I stroll to the stone wall that runs along the backyard, stepping across the dirt where the lawn ends and the extra cables lie, back inside, treading lightly over the electrical wires. No one has called me to breakfast or lunch or dinner, the usual time markers for the day. No one has called me to anything. Instead the hours have slid together. No schedule except getting the shot. Everything revolves around this: setup, shoot, takedown, repeat. The makeup woman’s makeup has worn off; her lipstick and eyeliner are smudged. The electricians’ shirts are untucked. The script girl’s hair, so neatly coiffed at the beginning of the day, sticks up in back where she has leaned against her chair, and her bangs are pressed greasy and flat against her forehead. I stop by the catering table whenever I am hungry; the caterers restock the snacks as soon as they are depleted: doughnuts and bowls of doughnut holes (doughnuts all day!), bagels and varieties of cream cheese, slices of carrots and celery and cucumber, cookies, sliced meats, every canned soda imaginable. I heard one of the caterers say that Katharine Ross drinks only Fresca. Picking at the treats all day, I have had no appetite, a phenomenon that is slightly unnerving. If I don’t crave anything, then when I eat it, I experience no pleasure. What a waste; doughnuts all day, and I barely care, though that doesn’t stop me from trying. My hands and anywhere else I have touched on my body—my cheek, the side of my neck, the crook of my elbow—are sticky from powdered sugar and jam filling. I am sweaty, my hair is mussed, my clothes are untucked. It’s its own uniform. By dusk I feel as if I am one with every person here. These are my people. This is my tribe. I never want this to end.
An assistant director’s walkie-talkie crackles and suddenly everything shifts. “Bring in Miss Ross.”
This intimate, casual messiness that I have decided has bound me to everyone around me on this set dissolves in an instant. Everyone cranes their necks to see the arrival. Katharine Ross is petite and delicate, not much taller than I am, but even so, the very air changes with her approach. It crackles, and all the comfortable, sleepy bonding I had been feeling vanishes. She is being led over the cables, guided safely to the fragment of real-world living room that has been set up, surrounded by cameras and lights and crew. Her double, small like she is, long straight hair, but without the crackle and the command, steps out of the circle, melting instantly in with us, the silent watchers, as Katharine Ross steps in to the lit-up space. All eyes are on her.
Bryan Forbes smiles, says something funny, nice, and encouraging. Katharine Ross brushes a strand of hair away from her face and smiles an I’m ready smile in return.
This is the reason we are here. The reward for all the long, dull sameness, the stretched-out hours: the shot, made possible only by the charisma of the talent, their own species of human. I feel important here; everyone knows my name. Greg and I take turns sitting in Katharine Ross’s and Paula Prentiss’s chairs, and Bryan Forbes’s director’s chair. These chairs are not the ornate furniture my mother has collected and displays in our museum-like rooms at home; they are only made of canvas and wood, but these seem more valuable. We will bring these chairs home; they will sit in our garage for years. Fall apart, decay. But the fact that we have them is proof that I am part of an elite world.
The actors are more important than my father, even. The entire set revolves around them. My father even comes alive around them.
Whose autographs do you have? my classmates ask. They are shocked when I say no one’s. I don’t explain that I have taken a stand in my mind that all people are the same. I don’t say that to ask for an autograph is to acknowledge these people are somehow better than me, better than the electricians who light their shots or the janitor who will sweep up the dust and debris we leave behind when the shot is made and a wrap is called. I don’t say if we are all the same, then I don’t have to feel sorry for the janitor or feel despair for myself, that I may never shimmer and shine the way I want to, like these movie stars around me.
* * *
We are back from my grandfather’s funeral in Illinois. My grandmother died two years before. My mother had put my grandfather on her diet of supplements and yeast milk to get ready for the gallbladder surgery he had needed but that his blood pressure was too high to have. After six months of following her diet, the doctors gave him the go-ahead and he was told that “he was healing like a twenty-five-year-old” after the surgery. But good health or no, he still sat in a chair and cried when he thought no one was looking. He missed my grandmother.
“He died of a broken heart,” my cousin Chipper says at the funeral.
Now we are in the Plandome kitchen, just back from the airport, and my father is raging about the mess on the countertops. On the flight home, my mother talked about the fact that my grandparents’ farm would need to be sold and the idea of that, plus my father’s yelling, suddenly seems too much for me to bear.
I pick up a kitchen knife.
“Stop,” I say to my father.
I take the knife and slowly, while he’s looking at me, slice the palm of my hand. Blood spurts.
“Christine!” he roars, and lunges at me. I drop the knife and run, heading out of the house and down the street. It’s night and the headlights from passing cars periodically light me up, so I duck into a neighbor’s hedge. My palm is bleeding, but the cut isn’t deep. I plan to stay there all night, but he comes looking for me, driving slowly down the street, his head out the open window, calling my name, not angrily, but worried, desperate. I want him to leave me alone, but I don’t want anything else bad to happen.
I stand up, walk toward him. He opens the car door and lets me in.
“I’m not proud of myself, Christine,” he says.
The next Sunday, I find an advertisement for the Dalton School in the back of the New York Times. I would be joining a freshman class of seventy-eight students. I see from the ad that the school places an emphasis on the performing and also creative arts, writing and drawing, which thrills me. I love to draw and I have been keeping a journal since I was nine. I beg to go and my parents let me apply. Miraculously, I am accepted.
In his office, the principal says, “You will be always on the outside because you live so far away.”
I don’t say, I will be even more on the outside if I don’t go at all.
For the first month I hide in the library on the tenth floor and read all of Tom Sawyer during lunch periods so I don’t have to sit alone in the cafeteria. I feel kindred with Tom, who has to guide his raft, has to know when to go with the flow of the current, when to fight it to stay afloat. Like Columbia Grammar, most of my classmates have been together since preschool. But this is different. I feel possibility. This mini universe, with its definable ten floors, sitting in the midst of New York, a world within a world, offers a context that grounds me. I am shy. I haven’t regained my fifth-grade cockiness, but there are girls around me I want to be friends with. I pick up the little cues—a subtle comment about this one’s lack, that one’s inability to see beyond her own preconceived notions—that their best friends aren’t already set. By the time spring comes, I have loosened up and I am having regular weekend sleepovers with Libby and Patty and Sasha and Jenny. We go for pizza, ride the bus to their various apartments, go to movies, move with freedom and ease around the city. I like this independence. I like getting around without needing my mother to drive me. I like beginning to feel I know my way.
Sometimes I take a taxi after school to Stars Deli a block away from my father’s office on Park Avenue. I order bagel and lox, take the bag up the elevator, and eat my sandwich on the couch beside his desk. I love visiting him in the office. I study the movie posters on the walls, listen to him on the phone talking to directors and actors. His voice raises, but whatever emotion he’s feeling has nothing to do with me, just the way I like it. When the day is done, we walk to Grand Central Station and catch the Long Island Railroad back to Plandome.