It Was Me All Along: A Memoir (5 page)

“That she can share my room with me.”

The Wednesday when I heard the crash of glass in the hallway, I had been sitting in Anthony’s room trying desperately to shove all of a wedding gown–bedecked Barbie into the front seat of her Corvette. It had taken almost an hour of convincing before Anthony caved and let me host the wedding there. I looked over at him, across the room playing
SEGA
on his TV. When I’d successfully managed stuffing the last bit of fabric into the car, I lay Ken across the trunk and pulled a caramel cream candy from the package in my lap. I untwisted the plastic wrapping and popped the whole thing into my mouth just as I heard the glass shatter.

I jumped as I bit down, my teeth squeezing through a glob of sticky caramel, and all the candies from my lap scattered about the floor. Dad cried out, “Mere!”

I heard her bare feet strike the few creaky floorboards as she ran to the breezeway.

Anthony hopped up instantly, calling a breathy “Andrea, come on” as he ran out through his bedroom door.

I sat motionless on the floor, listening to the commotion outside. I couldn’t do anything but chew. I worked my way through
the whole sticky center until it dissolved into gooey sugar on my tongue.

“Andreaaa! Come on!!” Anthony was shouting now.

They were already scurrying down the driveway, packing into our white Tercel as fast as they could. And I had to—simply had to—collect all my caramels. I urgently picked up each one that had scattered about the bedroom floor before getting up and rushing out of the room. I stuffed the candies deep within my pockets, the cellophane wrappers crackling as they settled into my denim overalls.

When I’d made it to the car, I could see that Dad was bleeding in the front seat. Anthony looked at him, so scared of the red seeping through the terrycloth towel wrapped around his arm. Mom was breathless and wide-eyed. She clenched the steering wheel and looked at me, standing outside the driver’s window looking in.

I climbed in the back beside Anthony. He squeezed my pudgy fist and pulled it closer to his side.

Dad was furious. In between cursing at Mom and writhing in pain, he looked back to tell me and Anthony that he had cut his arm on the storm door. I nodded, knowing that any more questions would only make him angrier. By the time we pulled up to the emergency room, the once-yellow towel had been completely dyed red. Sopping and heavy with blood.

We sat in the waiting room while two nurses rushed Dad behind a set of large swinging doors. I wondered how they’d make his arm better—if he’d return with a big white cast like the kid in my class who broke his arm falling from the monkey bars. I tried to think of what I’d write on it and what color marker I’d use. After a while, a doctor came out from behind the doors and asked to
have a word with Mom. They walked a few feet in front of where Anthony and I sat. And though Mom was using her quiet voice, I overheard her tell him that Dad had been drinking. They had been having a fight, and he accidentally punched his arm through a glass door. She swallowed before continuing that the glass had sliced open the whole length of his forearm, that from the way the blood gushed out, she thought he might have hit a vein, and …

I reached into my pocket for another caramel cream and unwrapped it, fumbling with the twisted plastic ends. The cellophane crackled so loudly, I couldn’t hear the rest of what she said. Suddenly, I was starving—so hungry I couldn’t get the candy into my mouth fast enough. The sound of my chewing was all that filled my head. Calm coursed through me.

I chewed each of my remaining caramels, one by one, until all that was left was a pile of shiny plastic wrappers on the seat beside me.

That day at the hospital was a turning point. Over the next few months, Mom stopped commenting on Dad’s drinking. I no longer heard her plead with him to “take a night off” when the two of them were in the kitchen alone. She didn’t stop him as he picked up the key ring and headed for the door after he realized the only drinks in the fridge were milk and Coke. She tells me now that she just didn’t want to fight anymore. She tried to see if she could just put up with it, so that Anthony and I still had an intact family.

And so he drank.

The handful of nights when Mom didn’t have a night shift, she cooked dinner, and we ate together. She’d make the most delicious meal, one of my favorites being meatloaf covered in a smoky-sweet glaze and served with potatoes she’d mashed with garlic, butter, and heavy cream. Those nights were the only ones when I didn’t
have to chew so loudly I couldn’t hear what was going on around me. The plates, the napkins, the silverware—they all sat peacefully in place. We became more comfortable in our seats around the square butcher-block table. And lots of times we laughed as we ate meals as big as the whole of our four personalities. I’d feel, at least momentarily, that all was getting better. Dad would be his charming, brilliant self. He’d tell us stories that would make me laugh so hard milk went up my nose midgulp. Anthony’s stutter would be less apparent. Each word, every sentence required less forethought when Dad didn’t yell. It felt as if Dad had placed his foot on the one wobbly leg of our table, making it steady for once. And I’d begin to think that maybe we were becoming normal.

But there were times, perhaps midmeal, when something would rattle him—a sentence, a sound, anything at all—and almost instantly, Dad was done eating. It was as if he’d grown sick and tired of holding that table still, and he resented us for even asking him to keep his foot in place. Suddenly I’d feel my place setting shift slightly. I’d grab hold of my plate, sure that I could stop the sliding if I held tightly and acted as though the wobble didn’t worry me. I’d work to keep the food on my plate sectioned securely. The peas had to maintain a strict border with the mashed potatoes, which couldn’t dare touch the meatloaf. My buttered biscuit was quarantined. Having each food perfectly within in its own boundary made me feel calm. I’d take a bite from the potatoes and make sure to smooth them carefully back into place. I’d eat peas in rows so as not to disturb the line that stood between them and the meatloaf. And if the boundaries I had created on my plate broke—if those peas and potatoes mingled—I worked quickly to put them back into place.

The last meal I can remember eating together around the same
table—all four of us—was in the early spring of 1994, the year I turned nine, just before Dad entered rehab and Mom told me we were moving. Dad’s parents, Nana and Papa, decided to move permanently to the condo they owned in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, rather than straddling the sunny South in winter and Medfield, Massachusetts, where they owned a house, in summer. Mom said that Nana and Papa eventually were going to give us their house and that, for now, we’d rent it from them. I didn’t understand fully why we’d leave our home to live in a town fifty miles away. Anthony had just begun high school and pleaded for us to stay. My best friend, Lilly, told me to run away instead. But when I overheard Mom on the phone with her sister Maureen, I heard words like “foreclosure” and sounds of crying as she talked about not having enough money.

All eight of Mom’s brothers and sisters drove up from Boston to Methuen that summer to help us move everything we owned to Nana and Papa’s house in Medfield. I cried alone in my room. I found Mom crying, too, in our basement, just after everyone had left and we were readying ourselves for a final exit. I saw the way she bent over as she cried in the dark corner of the laundry room, trying to hide from Anthony and me so that we wouldn’t know how much it killed her to leave. How badly she wanted to save our home for us, and how heavily failure weighed on her shoulders, and her heart, when she realized she couldn’t. I watched her cry for ten minutes without letting her know I was there.

When school started that fall, I wanted nothing to do with it. I feared being not only the new kid but the fat one, too. The bell had already rung as I walked into Mrs. Harrington’s fourth-grade classroom and made my way to the lone empty desk. I felt my cheeks
flush as heads turned. I smiled at every person I passed with my mouth closed, since in first grade, kids had told me that the gap in my teeth and the chubbiness of my cheeks made me look like a chipmunk when I smiled wide. Half of me wished I hadn’t come in late that first day so that I could have avoided such a pronounced entrance, while the other half wished I hadn’t come at all. Seeing the way the other nine-year-olds looked at me made my pants feel tighter, made the waistband dig deeper into my belly. Everyone had moved on to wearing jeans, and I was still in stretch pants. Stirrups, no less. I wore gold earrings when other girls had those cool stick-on holograms of stars and moons. I was out of place.

But a few months into the school year, I’d hit a kind of stride in Medfield. I learned that if I made fun of myself for being fat, then the other kids couldn’t do it first. I learned that being funny, especially with the boys, made it much less likely they’d call me things like “wide load” and “lardbutt.” I learned that certain jerseys in gym class were bigger than others and that I should always get to the pile of them first if I wanted mine to fit. I learned that even though the belts we wore while playing capture the flag never wrapped fully around my waist, they’d stay put if I tucked each end into my shorts. I learned that sometimes even your friends call you “whale” behind your back, but it doesn’t mean they don’t like you. I learned that it was easier to tell people that Dad was away on business rather than at home, drunk, and in his underwear. I learned that if I got invited to friends’ houses after school, I’d probably be asked to stay for dinner, and that would mean not eating alone at home while Mom worked.

Just as soon as I began to adjust to our new life, I woke up to find Dad hadn’t come home the previous night. Mom told me that
he’d entered rehab. I sat at the kitchen table that morning, confused at the suddenness of his leaving. I came to learn, three days later from listening in on all Mom’s phone calls, that the night he didn’t come home, Dad had driven up the interstate while swigging from a gallon-size jug of vodka and had crashed into the guardrail on the right side of the road. He was en route to our old home in Methuen, where he had intended to park his car in the garage, close the door, and drink with the engine running until carbon monoxide filled the air enough to kill him. He hoped he wouldn’t come back from that drive home. The day I pieced all of this together, I stayed home from school and ate five bowls of cereal in a row. I kept my eyes focused on the cereal box, the milk, and my bowl until all that was in the cabinet was gone. I ate until I felt so full, I couldn’t move. Until I couldn’t think of anything but the churning of my stomach as it digested Lucky Charms and Frosted Flakes and Trix.

The court took away his license. For two months the state held him in a rehabilitation facility three towns away from where we lived. When we visited him on weekends, he gave me art projects that he’d made during his free time—a painted ceramic Christmas ornament and a notebook of black-and-white sketches. He had us in stitches as he told stories about the various people he’d met in group therapy, using unique voices and gestures to mimic each. And when he finally came back to us, he seemed a stable man. He rode his bicycle around Medfield. He got a paper route. He helped me with my homework, and we played video games for hours on end—while Mom found a third and fourth job, trying desperately to make ends meet. From the way she seemed panic stricken all the time, I should have known that things weren’t going well. I should have known that something was wrong when I tagged along with
her on our weekly Sunday grocery shopping trips, and she told me our budget was twenty-five dollars. But somehow I still felt blindsided by the news that we had to leave our new home. Nana and Papa had lost patience with Dad, with our missing rent for a few months, and two weeks before Christmas 1994, they told Mom we had to leave their house by the first of January. There was no negotiating, no convincing them, even when Mom pleaded with Nana, “But, Kay …, we’ve got nowhere to go. Please.” We packed all our belongings in trash bags and liquor store boxes and moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Wilkins Glen, Medfield’s low-income housing, by the start of 1995. The second of January, unbeknownst to us, my grandparents changed the locks and trashed all our remaining possessions there.

Three weeks later, just after my tenth birthday, Mom signed me up for a bowling league. All my new friends had joined. Thursday afternoons after bowling, the bus dropped us off in front of the school, and I’d look out the frosted window to see the usual caravan of Caravans. Parents lined up to greet us. With a quick scan, I knew which parent belonged to which kid—and that in the whole crowd, no one was searching for me.

Most weeks I’d catch a ride from someone, saving me from a two-mile walk home. One of the parents would be kind enough to shuttle me, even though I lived farther away than they’d like. No one ever said it, but I sensed the silent sigh in the “Sure!” I noticed the brief flinch as we bounced over the speed bumps leading into my apartment complex. They’d smile into the rearview mirror as they remarked, “How nice they keep the grounds around here!” I’d smile back, feeling momentarily lucky that the low-income housing we moved into at least looked respectable.

One particular Thursday, I hopped off the last step of the bus
and saw Dad there. He’d stopped drinking and had taken to riding his bike again. I noticed how cold the air was that hit me. The temperature bent as low as New England weather knew to limbo. He was wearing a puffy down jacket, so loud in color that I could practically hear it shout “I’m royal BLUE!!” Snug on his head was a ski cap that some company must have been giving out as promotional swag at a conference years ago, when he held a job. It was obnoxious in its green, tan, and mustard glory. Brown, deconstructed. A pom-pom made of cheap yarn flailed from its top.

I gasped at the sight of him. Worse than his clothing was the old mountain bike. I was certain that it had rotted for years in someone’s garage before it finally hit the lawn of a yard sale.