Diamond in the Rough (3 page)

Dad and me, 1986

Dad loved a project in the garage, whether it was restoring a sports car or designing a canoe or building anything from the family-room couch to model airplanes to the bomb shelter on Canby Street. His uniform was jeans, a T-shirt, and a yellow canvas Windbreaker that was covered in all manner of wood stains and glue globs and dirt and oil. My mother tried to throw it away about fifteen years ago, but I rescued it. Somehow that Windbreaker is my father to me. When I think of my dad, he is a full garment, the color of the sun, marred by rips and stains and sweat. He seems always in pursuit of something and never quite getting it. He was by turns charming and fun-loving and ferocious, at once lovable and fearsome, and I never knew which trait to put my faith in.

When I was six, my sister, Kay, dethroned me. I have a photograph of me in my new homemade polyester Chinese pajamas curled around her little bouncing baby chair. She’s gazing up in wide-eyed wonderment, and I look totally forlorn. My sister has gorgeous wavy black hair, and my mother would put it up in a ponytail, twist Kay’s damp hair around her finger and slink the finger out, magically leaving a perfect ringlet. My hair was mousy brown and straight and always so full of tangles that my mother finally lost it one day, took me to the beauty shop, and had it all cut off with the shortest bangs imaginable. If memory serves, I resembled Richard Harris in
Camelot
, minus the goatee. The sibling rivalry was rather Laura Ingalls Wilder–esque, which is fitting given our Dakota birthplace, and hair really is so all-important. Kay got the goods there. She was also blessed with a willowy build, and she tanned easily, and for all of this I found many ways to torture her, like showing her a little scab that came off my knee and telling her it was a burned potato chip so she would eat it.

New sister, new pajamas, 1961

I am six years older, but I wasn’t much of a big sister to Kay. I didn’t know her very well until much later in our lives. It’s as though Geoff and I came as a matched pair and Kay and Clay came as another. My little brother, Clay, might be the most well adjusted out of all of us, save for the fact that he designs fighter jets for Lockheed Martin. But he also raises bonsai trees and is one of the dying breed of true gentlemen. Anyway, Kay and Clay had their world, Geoff and I had ours, and the two did not intersect. I’d moved out of the house by the time my sister was eleven and my little brother was eight. I was not really a witness to their growing up, nor did I even care to be.

Christmas card, 1972, in the canoe and pool Dad built

I moved to New York in 1980 when I was twenty-four and Kay was eighteen. My family drove up to give me some furniture, and Kay came along. She had finally grown into someone I could relate to. Her first morning there, we walked to the Greek coffee shop on the corner to get coffee. The cashier, upon seeing us, smiled and said, “There is no doubt what you are to each other.” Apparently we had become a matched pair, and in the ensuing years we’ve sometimes been hard to tell apart.

She began to write me letters from Austin, where she was attending college, and I would call or write back. I had a new friend. This meant the world to me, because I felt there was the possibility that someone in my family might regard me as more than troubled and neurotic. Kay liked me. She needed my friendship, too. We each needed a sister.

Our pet names for each other are “Fine” and “Violet.” The first was born from our salutations to each other when we wrote letters: “Dear fine yon sister” or “Dearest fine one.” This evolved simply into “Fine.” (Hello, Fine, how are you?) We developed our own language based on movie quotes, and this brought us to “Violet.”
It’s a Wonderful Life
is required viewing for us at Christmastime, and much of our dialogue is taken from it (“My mouth’s bleedin’, Burt! My mouth’s bleedin’!”)—most notably from an early scene at the drugstore where the young George Bailey, a soda jerk, greets the prettiest girl in school as she comes in to flirt with him: “H’lo, Violet.” Soon every phone call began this way. “H’lo, Violet.” Now we are Violet. And Vi. And Yer Vi. We’ve both lived in Austin now for fifteen years, and our daughters, the cousins, have grown up together. And although I may be the songwriter, it’s my sister, Kay, who developed our language and our nicknames, and she might say at this point, “Violet, there’ll be nary a dry eye!”

I got my mother’s cheekbones and mouth, my dad’s nose and eyes. My build resembles my father’s, solid and sinewy. My singing is a neat combination of the two of them—I inherited the dexterity of my mother’s trained, operatic-type voice and the earthy, just-us-folks warmth of my father’s delivery. I walk like a cowboy. I’m bound by deep love to my family and would do anything they asked of me. As my siblings and I got older, the gaps seemed to close, but growing up I sometimes felt like we were satellites, orbiting the planet of our parents, sending and receiving necessary information at regular intervals but ultimately alone out in space. To an extent, though, this has always been my nature—feeling apart from. Things would get worse for me before they got better.

2

A Vengeance

Me at ten, with a space between my teeth and a bad hair day, 1966

You don’t have to drag me down,
I descend.

The trouble mostly started when I was twelve, after the family moved from Vermillion to London, Ontario, briefly, and then on to Carbondale, Illinois. I was a simple geek in South Dakota, a cool cat in Canada, and a total freak show in Illinois—that was the general progression.

From as far back as I can remember, I have been afflicted with phobias of a hypochondriac’s nature. From the flu to flesh-eating viruses to good old predictable brain cancer, I’ve spent more than my fair share of time worrying about what I might die of. I drove my poor mother crazy by asking her constantly, “Will I be all right?” This has been diagnosed as “panic disorder,” but for me it’s just been a general way of life. I was neurotic, anxious, headstrong, emotional, overly sensitive, and high-maintenance. (Haven’t changed much …) I took a lot of energy. I was afraid of dying. I was afraid of getting sick. I was simply afraid. I don’t know if it was the mood disorder already in play or if I was just that kind of kid. Maybe it was a combination of both.

In 1967, when I was eleven, my father sold the small newspaper business he had inherited from his father and decided to go back to college to get a doctorate in psychology, so wherever his schooling took him, we followed. I’d lived in Vermillion my whole life, and I was terrified at the prospect of leaving. But leave we did. First stop: Canada!

We moved into a split-level ranch house in the suburbs of London, Ontario, on Hunt Village Crescent, just down the street from a popular girl named Tara who befriended me. As fate would have it, my status as “new girl” worked in my favor; plus, I had breasts by that time and was becoming almost pretty after my awkward, space-between-my-teeth-with-hairy-legs phase. I had my first-ever male teacher, Mr. Waite, who had red hair and a killer smile. I was in love with him, so of course I made an ass of myself all the time, most poignantly when he read the morning prayer over my shoulder one day and I realized after he walked away that on the back of my hand (which was palm down, holding the book open) was a monstrous booger.

Me, Dad, and Geoff, 1967

Canada worked out for me. It was very clean and had candy bars far superior to those in the States. One of my favorite memories is of skiing on winter weekends and enjoying the après-ski treat of a Cadbury’s Crunchie bar and a hot chocolate. A boy named Robbie liked me, and my mother actually
bought
me an outfit from Eaton’s Department Store—a navy blue wool skirt and a green, orange, and navy striped sweater vest. I reveled in my good fortune for a scant year, but Dad burned my little playhouse down when he announced we were moving again, to Carbondale, Illinois, where by the middle of seventh grade, at the age of twelve, I would become a bag lady.

Carbondale is a funky town in southern Illinois whose claim to fame is its large university, where my father opted to finish his degree. Carbondale held no charm for me; I’ll just come right out and say it. None of us liked it very much. We made fun of it. The way people talked and their accents and even the name were so … unpoetic.

The town bordered Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee and had the humidity and summer heat to prove it, which I vividly recall because we arrived in July. We took up residence on a cul-de-sac called Norwood Drive, situated on the outskirts of some woods that separated us from the upscale part of town. I’d never been around strip malls, Walmart, or Arby’s before. Vermillion was too small, Canada too smart. And I’d never experienced a southern accent either, which to me just sounded stupid. Now, having lived in Texas awhile, I’ve changed my mind, but Texas and southern Illinois are a bit different culturally, trust me. Of course, I made friendships there that would last a lifetime, a lesson worth noting. During some of the unhappiest times of my life, I’ve made some of my best friends.

None of this was obvious to me that blazing-hot summer, and I dreaded my first day of school. I had discovered a Top 40 radio station called KXOK out of St. Louis and was deeply immersed in the hits of that summer, such as “Everyday People,” “Gentle on My Mind,” “Get Back,” “Honky Tonk Women,” and “Just Dropped In (to See What Condition My Condition Was In).” But the unlikely song, if you can call it that, that stands out in my memory, the song that brought me to tears every time, was a jingle for Thom McAn shoes: