Good in Bed (18 page)

“I don't care what my gifts are. I don't like math.”

“Fine,” he'd say with a shrug, flinging the report card across the table like it had suddenly acquired an offensive smell. “Be a secretary. See if I care.”

He was like that with all of us—snarly, surly, dismissive, and rude. He'd come home from work, drop his briefcase in the hall, pour himself the first in a series of scotches on the rocks, and storm by us, upstairs into the bedroom, locking the door behind him. He'd either
stay up there, or retreat to the living room, with the lights turned low, listening to Mahler's symphonies. Even at thirteen, even without the benefit of a basic music appreciation class, I knew that nonstop Mahler, backed by the rattle of ice cubes in his glass, could portend nothing good.

And when he did bother to speak to us, it was only to complain: how tired he was, how little appreciated; how hard he worked to provide things for us, “you little snobs,” he'd slur, “with your skis and your swimming pool.”

“I hate to ski,” said Josh, who did. One run and he'd head back to the lodge to drink hot chocolate and fret, and if we forced him back out, he'd convince the Ski Patrol that he was suffering from imminent frostbite, and we'd have to collect him at the first aid cabin, stripped down to his long underwear and basting under the heat lamps.

“I'd rather swim with the other kids at the Rec Center,” said Lucy, which was true. She had more friends than the rest of us put together. The phone was always ringing. Another sore spot with my father. “That goddamn phone!” he'd yell when it rang during dinner. But we weren't allowed to take it off the hook. It could be his office, after all.

“If you hate us so much, why did you even have kids?” I'd scream at him, taunting him with what I knew was the truth. He never had an answer—just more insults, more anger, more scalding, punishing rage. Josh, just six, was “a baby.” Lucy, who was twelve, he either ignored or berated. “Stupid,” he'd say, shaking his head at her grades. “Clumsy,” when she'd drop a glass. And, at thirteen, I became “the dog.”

It's true, thirteen was not the year when I was looking my best. In addition to the breasts and hips I'd sprouted, seemingly overnight, I had acquired a mouthful of complicated-looking metal and rubber bands to correct my overbite. I had a de rigeur Dorothy Hamill haircut, which wasn't doing my full face any favors. I bought clothes in two sizes—baggy and baggier—and spent the whole year in a perpetual stoop, trying to hide my chest. I looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, only with zits and braces. I felt like a walking affront, like a collection of the things my father spent his days waging war against. He was all about beauty—its creation, its maintenance, its
perfection. Having a wife who'd fallen short of the mark and hadn't stayed thin was one thing, I supposed … but a daughter who'd failed so flagrantly was, evidently, unforgivable. And I had failed. There was nothing beautiful about me at thirteen, nothing at all, and I could feel that fact confirmed in the hard, hateful way he looked at me, and in all the things he said.

“Cannie's very bright,” I heard him tell one of his golf buddies. “She'll be able to take care of herself. Not a beauty,” he said, “but smart.”

I stood there, hardly believing what I'd heard, and when I finally believed it, I crumpled inside, like a tin can under a car's wheels. I wasn't stupid, and I wasn't blind, and I knew that there were many ways in which I differed from Farrah Fawcett, from girls in movies and on posters in boys' bedrooms. But I'd remembered his hand on my head, his beard tickling my cheek as he kissed me. I was his daughter, his little girl. He was supposed to love me. Now he thought I was ugly.
Not a beauty …
but what father doesn't think his little girl is beautiful? Except I wasn't little. And, I guessed, I wasn't his girl anymore.

When I look at pictures of myself from that time—and, understandably, there are only about four—there's this horrible desperate look in my eyes.
Please like me
, I'm pleading, even as I'm trying to hide myself behind a row of cousins at a bar mitzvah, beneath the hot tub bubbles during a pool party, with my lips drawn in a pained smile, stretched tight over my braces, ducking my head into my neck, hunching my shoulders, slouching to make myself shorter, smaller. Trying to disappear.

Years later, in college, when a friend was recounting some bit of suburban childhood horror, I tried to explain how it was with my father. “He was a monster,” I blurted. I was an English major, versed in Chaucer and Shakespeare, Joyce and Proust by then. I still hadn't found a better word than that.

My friend's face got very serious. “Did he molest you?” she asked. I almost laughed. Given how much of my father's conversation with me revolved around how ugly, how fat, how hideous I was, molestation was the last thing I would have expected.

“Did he abuse you?” she asked.

“He drank too much,” I said. “He left us.” But he never hit me. He never hit any of us. It would have been easier if he had. Then there would have been a name we could give it, a box to put it in, a label for the box. There would have been laws, authorities, shelters, TV talk shows where reporters gravely discussed what we were enduring, a built-in recognition of what we'd experienced, to help us through.

But he never raised a finger. And at thirteen, at fourteen, I had no words for what he was doing to us. I didn't even know how to start that conversation. What would I have said? “He's mean”?
Mean
meant being grounded, meant no television after dinner, not the kind of daily verbal assault my father would routinely deliver over the dinner table, a scathing recitation of all the ways I'd failed to live up to my potential, the walking tour of the places that I had failed.

And who would have believed me? My father was always charm personified to my friends. He remembered their names, and their boyfriends' names, he would inquire courteously about summer plans and college visits. They wouldn't have believed me, and if they had they would have wanted me to explain. And I had no explanation, no answers. When you're on a battleground, you don't have the luxury of time to dwell on the various historical factors and sociopolitical influences that caused the war. You just keep your head down and try to survive it, to shove the pages back in the book, close the covers and pretend that nothing's broken, nothing's wrong.

The summer before my senior year of high school, my mother took Josh and Lucy to Martha's Vineyard for the weekend. A friend had a rental house, she was itching to get out of Avondale. I had my first summer job, as a lifeguard at a local country club. I told my mom that I'd stay home, watch the dogs, hold down the fort. I figured it would be fine: I could have the house to myself, entertain my twenty-three-year-old boyfriend away from her watchful eye, come and go as I pleased.

For the first three days it was fine. Then I came home in the predawn hours of the fourth morning, and it was as if I were twelve again. There was my father in the bedroom, the suitcase on the bed,
the stacks of white T-shirts and the piles of black socks—maybe the same ones, I thought wildly, that he'd taken the last time.

I stared at them, and then at him. My father looked at me for a long moment. Then he sighed.

“I'll call,” he said, “when I have my new number.”

I shrugged. “Whatever,” I said.

“Don't talk to me like that!” he said. He hated when we were flip. He demanded respect, even—especially—when he didn't deserve it.

“What's her name?” I asked.

He narrowed his eyes. “Why do you want to know?”

I looked at him and couldn't think of an answer. Did I imagine that it made any difference? Could a name even matter?

“Tell your mother,” he began. I shook my head.

“Oh, no,” I said. “Don't make me do your dirty work. If you've got something to say, tell her yourself.”

He shrugged, like it didn't matter. He added a few more shirts, a fistful of ties.

“I'm glad you're leaving. Do you know that?” I said. My voice was too loud in the early-morning quiet of the house. “We'll be better off without you,” I said.

He looked at me. Then he nodded. “Yes,” he said, “I think maybe you will.”

He went back to his packing. I went back to my bedroom. I lay on the bed—the bed where my father had read to me, a million years ago—and closed my eyes. I'd been waiting for this, after all. I'd known it was coming. I thought it would feel the way it does when a scab over an old wound finally falls off—a momentary pang, a little bit of pain, a sense of absence. Then nothing. Just nothing at all. That was what I was supposed to feel, that was all I wanted to feel, I thought fiercely, tossing and turning on my bed, trying to find comfort. It didn't matter, I told myself, over and over again. I just couldn't figure out why I was crying.

I went to Princeton because he told me to, in one of his last acts of hands-on parenting. I'd wanted to go to Smith. I liked the campus,
liked the crew coach, liked the idea of an all-girls' school, where the focus would be on learning, where I could be free to be who I was: your basic late-eighties model nerd with her nose in a book.

“Forget it,” my father pronounced over the table. He'd been gone for six months by then: relocated to a new suburb, living in a brand-new shiny condo with a brand-new shiny girlfriend. He'd agreed to meet us for dinner, then canceled and rescheduled twice. “I'm not sending you to some dyke school.”

“Larry,” said my mother, her voice quiet and hopeless. All of her good humor and cheer had been leeched from her by then. It would be years—and Tanya—before she laughed and smiled easily.

My father ignored her, glaring at me suspiciously, a forkful of steak raised halfway to his mouth. “You aren't a dyke, are you?”

“No, Dad,” I said, “I actually prefer threesomes.”

He chewed. Swallowed. Patted his lips with his napkin. “That's two more people than I'd have thought would be interested in seeing you naked,” he said.

As much as I'd liked Smith, I hadn't liked Princeton. The campus looked like the staging ground for a very successful eugenics experiment: Everyone was blond, preppy, and perfect, except for the dark-haired girls who were sleek, exotic, and perfect. During the weekend I'd spent there, I hadn't seen a single fat person, or anyone with bad skin. Just acres of shiny hair, straight white teeth, and perfect bodies in perfect clothes arrayed beneath the perfect willow trees that grew beneath perfectly Gothic stone halls.

I said I'd be miserable. My father said he didn't care. I dug my heels in. He told me it was Princeton or nothing. And by the time I'd been packed off to Campbell Hall and stayed long enough to start classes and have my graduation-present mountain bike stolen from the library bicycle rack, the divorce was final, and he was gone for good, sticking us with a tuition bill of which he'd paid just enough to make it impractical for me to start over anywhere else. So I quit the crew team—no big loss to me, or the team, I suspect, since I'd gained the requisite Freshman Fifteen, plus the fifteen pounds my roommate should have gained but didn't, thanks to her diligent bulimia—and
got a job with the Department of Food Services, affectionately known as Doofus to its employees.

If college is supposed to be the best years of your life, then it's safe to say that I spent the best years of my life in a hairnet, dishing out reconstituted scrambled eggs and limp bacon, loading dirty dishes on the conveyor belt, mopping the floors, looking at my classmates out of the corner of my eyes and thinking that they were all so much more beautiful, graceful, comfortable in their own skins than I could ever be. They all had better haircuts. And all of them were thin. True, many of them were thin because they were sticking their fingers down their throats after every meal, but at times that seemed like a small price to pay for having basically everything a woman could want—brains, beauty, and a way to eat ice cream and cherry Danishes and still stay skinny.

“Good Hair” was the first article I wrote for the campus alternative newspaper. I was a freshman, and the editor in chief, a junior named Gretel whose own hair was kept in a paramilitary blond brush cut, asked me to write more. By sophomore year I was a columnist. By junior year I was a senior writer, spending every hour I wasn't slinging hash or pushing a mop in the
Nassau Weekly
's cramped, dusty offices in Aaron Burr Hall, and I'd decided that this was what I wanted to do with my life.

Writing let me escape. It let me escape Princeton, where everyone was chic and stylish and, in the case of the guy down the hall, the future ruler of some minor Middle Eastern principality. It let me escape the insistent tug of my family and its ongoing misery. Writing was like slipping into the ocean, a place where I could move easily, where I could be graceful, and playful, and invisible and visible all at once—a byline, not a body. Sitting in front of the computer, with the screen blank and the cursor blinking, was the best escape I knew.

And there was plenty to escape from. In the four years I was at Princeton, my father remarried and had two more children. Daniel and Rebecca. He had the nerve to send me pictures and birth announcements. Did he think I'd be happy, seeing their squinched-up baby faces and tiny baby footprints? It felt like being kicked. It wasn't
that he didn't want more children, I realized sadly. It was that he hadn't wanted us.

My mother went back to work, and her weekly telephone calls were full of complaints about how schools, and kids, had changed since she got her teaching certificate. The subtext was clear: This wasn't the life she signed up for. This wasn't where she expected to be, at fifty, making ends meet on alimony and what the local school board paid permanent substitutes.

Meanwhile, Lucy had flunked out of her first year at school in Boston, and was living at home, attending community college haphazardly, and majoring in unsuitable men. Josh was spending three hours a day in the gym, lifting weights so frequently that his upper body looked inflated, and had pretty much stopped talking except for a series of tonal grunts and the occasional “Whatever.”