Blue Plate Special (15 page)

I gradually found three other loners and fellow invisibles: Jane, a prematurely middle-aged-looking senior with Coke-bottle, beige-framed glasses and a rocking, lurching gait—one leg shorter than the other and turned in at the ankle; Ovalea, who was beautiful, hilarious, and sharp, but permanently hunched over and knotted in her wheelchair, slated to die young of muscular dystrophy; and Celia, a chubby, fresh-faced toughie who was an obvious butch lesbian at a time when no one ever showed even the remotest outward signs of being gay. I befriended all of them aggressively. I cornered them like the wounded gazelles of the pack and bit their necks till they succumbed. Then I had three friends. Jane and I ate lunch together. She blinked at me from behind her thick glasses as she told me everything about herself in a shy rush as if no one had
ever asked her about herself before. I rode the back of Ovalea’s electric wheelchair between classes, the two of us cracking up so hard I almost fell off, and she almost fell out. Celia took me with her kind, shy parents for a week on their sailboat in the Sea of Cortez; she had a crush on me, obviously but quietly and no doubt painfully.

My sisters fared far worse than I did. We all three went to different schools—Emily was in Cottonwood at the elementary school, Susan was at the junior high in Clarkdale—and they were both struggling, as I was, to make friends, to fit in, to find some common ground with anyone at all. Emily, who was loud and not at all timid, was teased for being weird, which was at least a form of attention; Susan, who was painfully shy and meek, disappeared altogether.

Then, near the end of that miserable first semester, as the town got emptier and darker and colder and spookier and lonelier, our mother announced that she was leaving Jim. Although there were signs, none of us had had any inkling that this was coming. Emily took the news with equanimity, but Susan and I were furious with our mother. We had just moved to a lonely new town, uprooted our perfectly happy lives in Phoenix, and now our parents were splitting up? It was too much for us to take.

But our mother was adamant: Jim was going to move downstairs to the dark, dingy little one-bedroom apartment on the second floor, and we kids would all stay in our penthouse suite and go downstairs for dinner with him every other night. So on Jim’s nights, we trooped down to his depressing apartment to eat the usual steak with sautéed garlic, celery, and onions while Jim drank and sighed sadly. By the end of dinner, he was always drunk.

Our mother was no better. She was quiet and brooding and deeply unhappy. We were broke, and both my mother and Jim were struggling to make money: he had opened a private
architectural office in Sedona and was just starting to get clients, and she was collecting a small amount of unemployment and trying to open a private psychotherapy practice down in Cottonwood, but hadn’t gotten it off the ground yet. On top of that, the whole town turned against her; former friends even crossed the street to avoid her. Evidently, Jim had been hanging out at the Spirit Room, drunkenly crying to the bar at large about how heartbroken he was, how he would have done anything for Liz, how much he loved his family. And thus the tide of public opinion had turned decidedly toward him.

“This is what happens when you leave your husband,” my mother told me. “People take sides.”

We all spent a grim winter together, trying to make sense of what had happened to us, to our family.

I
n the spring, I met Valerie, who was a freshman, like me. She was flamboyant and smart and weirdly seductive and crazy. She looked and acted like a hot twenty-five-year-old television star. She was writing a
Star Trek
teleplay on spec that she hoped to sell to the show’s producers, and she belonged to the Mingus drama club. I spent a few nights at her house, a fancy modern split-level in the red rocks of Sedona. Each time, we stayed up till past midnight, and she whispered to me under the covers about some new rare or unheard-of disease that she was suffering from, a rare brain infection or a blood cancer no one had ever seen before; she claimed that she was written up in all the medical journals.

“Tryouts for the spring musical are next week,” she said to me one day at school. “You should come!”

After school, on the day of the tryouts, I followed Valerie down to the auditorium stage and met the drama teacher, a neatly bearded, Shakespearean-looking guy everyone called by his first name, Von. Von’s assistant director, a bitchy redheaded
senior named Carol, handed each of us a script of
Cheaper by the Dozen
, a musical based on a book I’d read many times and loved. Von asked several of us to read for the part of Anne Gilbreth, the ingenue, the lead, the part Valerie knew she was going to get because she was fated to be a star. I couldn’t act, but I could read aloud. Then Von had us gather around the piano and, one by one, sing a solo.

Somehow I got the part. Valerie swallowed her jealousy and became my greatest supporter. She continued to pretend to be happy for me when I got cast as Gloriana in
The Mouse That Roared
the following fall (she even loaned me the beautiful satin green dress, formfitting with puffy sleeves, that she had been planning to wear herself for that part) and then as Julie Jordan in
Carousel
the following spring.

Suddenly, after months of being invisible and knowing no one, I was the star of the drama department. In that little cluster of towns in the middle of nowhere, this was a big deal. My name was regularly splashed on posters all over the school, all over what passed for Cottonwood’s downtown shopping district. My name and picture appeared in the local paper advertising the high school play, the big event of every season. Overnight, everyone seemed to know who I was. It was one of the strangest years of my life.

That summer, a year after we had moved to Jerome, Jim and my mother got divorced. Jim moved back upstairs and stayed in the Central Hotel, while Emily and I moved with our mother up the mountain to the Talley House, the ramshackle but beautiful former mansion of the local Copper King himself. Susan had left home, at barely thirteen, to study ballet in Flagstaff, where she lived with another family whose daughter studied ballet at the same school. She came home sometimes on weekends, increasingly pale and alarmingly thin (she later confessed that she’d lived on chocolate Ex-Lax during those years), but she never lived at home again. Our years as a complete family were over.

The Talley House sat high up at the top of the cobblestoned, steep little Magnolia Street above the Catholic church, set into the mountainside, so the road wound up and around the back of the house at rooftop level. My mother paid two dollars a month in rent to the Jerome Historical Society in exchange for restoring it. She spent countless hours stripping and refinishing the original woodwork in the kitchen, living room, and stairwell; she had time to do this, alas, because her fledgling psychology private practice had hardly any clients—no one in the Verde Valley quite knew what to make of a psychologist. Maybe it didn’t help that the parking lot by my mother’s office was visible to anyone driving by: who would want their pickup
truck to be recognized by the neighbors? Consequently, the Talley House gleamed with refinished old wood. Still, the roof leaked, the house was freezing cold in the wintertime, there were broken windows in the sleeping porch, and the plaster was cracking. I didn’t care; I had always dreamed of living in a house like this. There were window seats in the bay windows, hidden porches, a sunroom upstairs, Victorian curlicues. The front windows looked out over the whole Verde Valley to the red rocks of Sedona and the San Francisco Peaks and Mogollon Rim beyond.

Winters were lonely and cold, but in the summers in Jerome, honeysuckle grew around our porch railings, massive, amazing thunderstorms crossed the Verde Valley every afternoon, and there was always a potluck to go to. The mid-seventies was the golden age of many things, among them the casserole, the naked-adult party, and the uninhibited smoking of marijuana. Those three things went together far too often for my liking. I dreaded the nude-sketching potlucks at John’s sculpture commune down in the valley in Cornville, as much as I dreaded the naked bacchanalian potlucks at Gary’s handmade sauna down in the Jerome gulch. My unself-conscious Berkeley-born little sisters shucked their togs along with the adults and other kids and joined the crowd while I, a fiercely modest fifteen-year-old, stayed fully clothed, reading my book in a corner, averting my eyes from the horrifying display of boobs and nut sacks and butts and (oh my God) penises, dangling softly while dudes squatted over their sketch pads, eyeing a naked woman draped over a couch or chair. Of course my family teased me for being such a puritan, which made it all worse.

E
very weekday morning, I got up at 5:30 to curl my bobbed hair under, which was the prevailing style at Mingus
(either that, or curled out so it flipped up), with a curling iron in front of the propane heater in the kitchen, the only other heat source in the house besides the woodstove in the living room. Then I made myself two buttered pieces of whole-wheat toast, which I washed down with a protein shake consisting of a cup of whole milk, a tablespoon of chalky but sweet Super Pro powder (very trendy at the time), a raw egg, a dash of vanilla extract, and a banana.

My mother and Emily were still sleeping when I left the house and walked a mile and a half down highway 89A through the town and along the ridgeback to the old Jerome high school to catch the school bus. During the winter months, I saw no one else the whole way down, and no cars passed me; Jerome really felt like a ghost town, dark and cold, deserted and windswept. I was one of only four teenagers who caught the bus there; the other three, Desiree, Julie, and Dani, were blond, bubbly, popular cheerleaders and athletes. I had little to say to them, or they to me. I did all my homework on the long bus ride to school as we wound through the little towns, picking up the respectable children of Clarkdale citizens, then the Indians, Mexicans, and poor white kids from the trailer parks of Centerville, then the “rich kids” who lived in the new developments outside Cottonwood.

In the Mingus cafeteria, we had the option of getting the hot lunch or buying junk food; naturally, almost everyone went for the junk. I had pocket money because of a Saturday job at a pottery store, so my lunches generally consisted of Ding Dongs, Doritos, and, as a nod to health, a carton of milk. I never brought food from home anymore. When I got back from school, I went to the kitchen and pulled out the Cracker Barrel sharp cheddar, an oblong orange block I sliced thickly. With a handful of Triscuits, I went upstairs to read whatever novel I was currently engrossed in, spending the whole cold afternoon under the covers, luxuriantly munching my afternoon snack
until it was time to go downstairs to help with dinner or to walk with Emily down to Jim’s if it was one of his nights.

I often stayed late at school for rehearsals, and Jim or my mother picked me up and drove me home afterward. I had almost no talent for acting, but I loved the excitement and camaraderie, the rush of adrenaline, the gathering I felt viscerally of my own forces as I walked onstage in order to command the audience’s attention. I liked the other kids in the drama club. They were the interesting, fun, offbeat people I’d been looking for during my first semester. I had a lot of friends now; I finally felt as if I belonged here.

That year, for a playwriting class, I wrote a one-act “avant-garde” play, inspired by Ring Lardner and Woody Allen, essentially a dramatic monologue by a New York guy in a New York apartment talking about his New York life; clearly, I was in love with the idea of New York. Watching my fellow actors perform my play, I was seized with a panic-stricken urge to edit it on the spot. I had to hide my eyes at one point, as if that would help. It was so overwritten, so self-consciously clever, so manifestly not funny. Instead of the urbane, witty satire I’d intended, I had a long-winded fiasco. It was a useful lesson.

Jim’s drinking, which had been bad before, was now dangerous for himself and for others. One day, as he was driving my best friend, Dale, home from a rehearsal of
Carousel
, with me in the passenger seat and her in back, he worked his way rapidly through a six-pack of Coors, driving up the hairpin switchbacks to Sedona, where she lived. He drove fast and drank fast and hardly talked to us as he threw the empty cans at my feet. Dale and I sat silently in shared mortal terror.

After Dale got out of the car, safely arrived at home by some miracle, and said a shaky good night to me and went inside, I said stonily to Jim, “You’re drunk. You shouldn’t drink and drive like that.”

Instead of apologizing, he spent the entire way back to
Jerome droning obsessively and repetitively about how hurt he still was by my mother, his lack of money, his health problems, and his car troubles. His unhappiness was so complete, it was as if he were wrapped in it for warmth along with the alcohol. There was nothing I could say to help him then, or ever.