Fiction Ruined My Family (4 page)

Dad would often say-sing this bit from F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story “The Jelly-Bean” as he tucked me in at night, past the age when others had been tucked in, for which I took a lot of shit from my sisters. They thought it was babyish to still be tucked in at ten years old and it was, but this is when I got his full attention and stories of his childhood in St. Louis.

For a long time I thought Dad had written “The Jelly-Bean” about me. He was a writer. My name was Jeanne. The name in the poem was spelled how I spelled Jeanne, the French spelling of Jean (pronounced Jeannie), so it must have been written by Dad for me. I never questioned the brown eyes in it and the fact that mine are blue. “The Jelly-Bean,” not that I understood a word of it at the time, is about Jim Powell, a jelly bean, a southern term for an idler. Jim's family was once prominent, but after his parents die, he's alone, the house gets sold, and he is no longer part of Georgia society. He's back in town after a stint in the Navy during the war, and he gets invited to a country club dance—the kind of fancy affair he doesn't normally hang around, and he meets a gorgeous society girl named Nancy Lamar with a thing for highballs. Jim falls in love with her, but the next day hears that after he left her the night before at the dance, she ran off and married some other guy. The woman is, yes, like Zelda Fitzgerald but also like Mom at that age. Her wildness and beauty are what captivate Jim, not anything like kindness or intelligence. And like Jim Powell, Dad was in the Navy and had come from a prominent family.

As he tucked me in, Dad told me stories about Ella Voss, his black nanny, who had been emancipated at age eight in 1863 in Helena, Arkansas, and had come to be his mother's nanny, and then, when she had children, Ella took care of my father and his brother and three sisters, too. He lovingly imitated Ella Voss and her baffling refrain for any situation he brought to her as a young boy: “Lye rose catch medlars, Mister Steve, lye rose catch medlars.” He wasn't sure what this actually meant, but it came to be comforting, even in its mysteriousness. If any of the five children spilled their milk at the dinner table they'd be sent into the kitchen to eat with the help. My father would intentionally spill his milk to eat with Ella Voss and her sisters Ginny, Alberta, and Odessa, who also helped out at their house, and hear stories of their lives.

My father said his mother gave birth to him and had a Corona typewriter on her lap a couple hours later to finish her daily column, “Here and There,” for the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat.
“Ella was all I knew, raised me, and then one day when I was about six this white woman comes in and says she's my mother. My sister Tad cried when she found out she was white. Just fell apart.” My father, a man who has gone through life with just half a degree of separation, told me that Grandma Darst had, for about fifteen minutes, until she decided it was complete silliness, been in the UDC, United Daughters of the Confederacy, with Tennessee Williams's mother. His sister Betty was friendly with Dakin Williams, Tennessee's brother. His childhood was teeming with characters and artists and newspaper life and kids and race relations, politics, civil rights and funny stories. It sounded crazy and wonderful, and yet I knew listening to him that there was something else at work. My father's stories were postdated checks, promissory notes of what was to be restored: the prominence, the name, the black chauffeurs smoking and having a plate of food at the back door of their house on Westminster Place while his uncle Joe, the mayor of St. Louis, was inside talking with his mother and father about housing for the poor, civil rights, revitalizing the city economically, the plans for the Saarinen arch on the riverfront. They were meant to sustain us, sustain him, until a better day, a day when he would fulfill his promise as a writer. It didn't take a lot of convincing to get Dad to tell stories about his childhood, St. Louis or his family. The past was his number-one love. If there is some genetic opposite of my father it might be Madonna. I wonder if reinventing yourself would even be a concept that my father could grasp. Reinvent? My father didn't even rewrite.

I was heading unenthusiastically into the fifth grade. I thought having skipped a grade out in Amagansett proved that I had already conquered school. I didn't want to be a writer, I wanted to be a detective. I carried a huge satchel around with me wherever I went, even just around the house. There was an office in this bag: pens, yellow lined legal pads stolen from Dad, a camera, a tape recorder, baby powder for fingerprinting, handcuffs. Others in the family didn't see my potential as a private eye, however, they just saw me as a dick. It seemed that if I touched something, it broke; if I borrowed a sweater from one of my sisters, a scoop of chocolate ice cream would catapult itself off my cone onto my chest; if Eleanor and Julia were piling on Katharine, joking around, I'd join in, throwing my weight on the pile, but for some reason my jump would be the one that would bust Katharine's wrist. I don't know if you've ever been accused of being an imbecile, but if you have, you know that once word has gotten out that you are a moron, there is no turning public opinion back in your favor.

“What is wrong with you?” My mother had said these words so many times to me that my sisters had adopted them. I had a habit of grabbing some scissors and pulling up a chair while my mother cooked dinner. I cut up whatever was in sight—letters, bills, report cards—it was relaxing after a long day at school to just cut things up, cut, cut, cut. The way some people needlepoint. My father saw me doing this once and said, “Don't be an idiot.” I didn't speak to him all night, and then I wrote a retaliatory note to him, in pencil so dark it ripped the paper. I pressed down on it like a dying man, writing, “I am not an idiote. Do not call me one!” I put it on his pillow. My dad apologized right away but from that day on whenever I did something stupid, my sisters would say, “I am not an ID-I-OTE! Do not call me one!” in the voice of John Merrick, the Elephant Man.

My sisters and I were the Marx Brothers for Halloween for four years in a row. Eleanor was Groucho, Katharine was Chico, Julia was Harpo, and I was Zeppo. Remember Zeppo? Of course you don't, nobody remembers Zeppo, because he was the “unknown” Marx brother, the normal one, the straight man. Zeppo. Who knew what Zeppo even looked like. I could have worn a kilt and carried bagpipes, for all anybody knew about this brother. This is the essence of being the youngest kid. In exchange for shabby treatment, however, comes the dubious reward of incompetence. I was someone with no responsibilities. I'd be putting a cup in the dishwasher when Eleanor or Katharine would snatch it out of my hand.

“Mom! Jeanne was trying to put a mug in the dishwasher! You should have seen her!” Did I have no responsibilities because I was an imbecile or was I an imbecile because I had no responsibilities?

 

 

 

Julia was developing a love of paperwork and red tape. She was a sort of child notary public; if you asked to borrow her baseball mitt, she would quickly draw up a lot of forms for you to sign and date, with a lot of dramatic stamping on these forms, and then she'd say, “I'll have my people look into this and get back to you.” Just for kicks she'd sit and copy the Bible onto yellow legal pads.

She set up a real estate office in the basement with files of available properties on index cards. The problem was no one ever went down in the basement, it wasn't renovated or anything, it was like the basement of an apartment building, complete with boiler and cement floors, cold, musty, dark. After a while she'd come up to the kitchen and make an announcement.

“Ah, good morning, everyone. I'd like to let all you people know that my office is now open for business and I've got some terrific new properties you really should have a look at. A very airy condo in Boca Raton, right on the beach. Excellent price. Stop by, I'd be happy to go over the details with any of you.” And she'd head downstairs for a few hours.

The only family members Julia liked to talk to were Guinness and Oiseau and our cat. Yes, Julia talked to the animals, and sometimes renamed them; Guinness became Toddy, after Hot Toddy, a delightful concoction of whiskey, sugar and lemon that we had discovered and fallen in love with when a nasty flu was going around. Our cat, Kitty, became Cuckoo. Of course, no one used these new names but Julia.

“Cuckoo doesn't like it when you smoke at the table, Mother,” Julia would announce at dinner, and we'd all think, “Who the fuck is Cuckoo?”

She also spent a lot of nights at her librarian's station in the living room, where she checked out books. If you were just passing through the living room she would attempt to lure you into the library.

“Excuse me, ma'am? Can I interest you in a book today? Perhaps Freud's
Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
? No? Well, then, let's see what else we have here . . . What about this wonderful biography of Matisse, you look like an art lover,” she'd say, letting out a loud cackle.

Julia would copy the Bible while I checked out
Tales of the Jazz Age,
which contained “The Jelly-Bean,” and we'd sit in her “library,” where she had pulled a table into the middle of the room to create a checkout desk, silent but together in our two pretend worlds.

 

 

 

 

KATHARINE WAS THE READER of all of us. Reading was more like a compulsion than a pastime with her, like a bowl of nuts on the table. If there was something, anything, between you and Katharine—Hemingway, a phone bill—she must, must pick it up and read it. If she was ever to visit you on death row with those little cubicles and Plexiglas dividers, I sure as hell hope no one left behind a
People
magazine on the table. “Umm hmm. So what time is the execu—Whoa! Look at how fat Alec Baldwin's gotten!”

I was more of a periodic, occasionally-falling-in-to-a-book-I-just-couldn't-find-my-way-out-of reader, but Katharine was a daily reader. She didn't read to please Dad; she was just a genuinely passionate reader.

She read while doing other things, multitasking back when it was called rudeness. Since our father forbade any activity during dinner other than conversation—no music, no reading, and definitely no television—my sister would pick up ketchup bottles or turn over a fork to read the inscription on the back of it.

She was the good kid of all of us, the good student, the friend to us all. She remains the only person on speaking terms with everyone, the rest of us have a speaking-to percentage of about forty-five. While Eleanor, Julia and I were ripping each other's arms off while going in for the last bunch of asparagus slathered in hollandaise, Katharine was bringing the empty platter into the kitchen on the philanthropic errand of fetching more. Once in the kitchen, she fell into the expectant pages of a Craig Claiborne cookbook on the table until my mother would call for her and the remaining asparagus. Some people can't live in the moment. Katharine couldn't get out of the moment.

She read while you were reading to her. I'd stand in her bedroom doorway reading her the part in
The Crucible
where Giles Corey defends himself from Thomas Putnam's witchy accusations with “A fart on Thomas Putnam!” which filled me with hope that good literature and fart jokes were not mutually exclusive, until I realized she was dropping her eyes down to a copy of
Pride and Prejudice
balanced on her stomach
—
a book that could have used a little farting to liven it up, in my opinion.

She loved the book as object. I remember the shame I felt, more than once, when Katharine caught me placing a book on its spine or dog-earing pages. “Jeanne, you can't do that to books! Look what you did,” and she would pick up the victimized text, hold it up for me to consider its plight. “You can't treat books this way!” she would say, as if you had just stubbed out your cigarette between Lassie's eyes.

Even though she chose reading over a word or two with me time and time again, I wanted to be her confidante in a way that knows no discouragement. She had something I did not, an escape hatch, and I wanted her to show it to me.

 

 

 

 

AS THE OLDEST, Eleanor always had to take care of us and it seemed like from a very early age, Eleanor did not want to be like Mom and Dad in any way. When Mom became a serious cook in Bronxville, Eleanor had to have a dinner different from what everyone else was having, as if she were a VIP ordering off the menu. “I'll have a cube steak, Mom.” Always the same thing. Cube steak and a chunk of iceberg lettuce with Green Goddess dressing. She loved any kind of convenience food, preferred it to fresh food. She thought we were all awfully silly with our roasted potatoes and rosemary roast chicken. If the packaged version of some food was available, she'd always choose that over its natural state and eat it as if it was just the most luxurious thing in the world. Eleanor was a theater person at Bronxville High School, but her real love was television. She defied Dad by being blatantly middlebrow. She did not even pretend to care about books. She'd simply say, “I don't like reading unless I have to,” or something equally mind-blowing to my father. If she could have gotten away with it she might have said, “Dad, I don't care about books anymore. I'm on to new stuff now. The whole world's on to new stuff now.”

One night, shortly after we had moved to Bronxville, my parents went out to dinner in the city and Eleanor, as usual, was in charge of everybody. She heated up some pot pies and announced we would be watching
The Ordeal of Patty Hearst
on TV.

Katharine was on the divan and Julia and Eleanor and I were all on the carpet, leaning against Mom and Dad's bed. Guinness was at the top of the stairs behind the door that led downstairs. Guinness barked quite a bit, but the main thing that provoked barking and violent attacks was not the sound of intruders or other dogs on the street but the sound of laughter. Nothing made our dog more nuts than the sound of people enjoying themselves, but in particular it was Katharine's laugh that drove Guinness to attack. When he heard Katharine laugh, Guinness would charge Katharine and maul her. I can understand the impulse, certainly; some people's laughs make me want to attack in the same way. Too-loud laughs—too fake—a combination of too loud AND fake, in abundance in Southern California and on television, are biteworthy. But Katharine's laugh is just an ordinary ha-HA! kind of laugh, ever so slightly higher in pitch than her normal voice. Which was why it was so continually surprising that he should single her out. When she would laugh in the kitchen, where Guinness dwelt most of the time, you'd just glare at her as if to say “What the fuck are you doing?” and then, as if Katharine had stuck a steak in her shirt, Guinness would run at her and bite her legs, jump on her, scratch her legs with his claws, nip at her arms, all the while barking and growling.