Look at You Now (6 page)

“There will be no skipping meals for you anymore, Liz. Breakfast is in ten minutes and you need to get there.”

On the way to breakfast I passed the big, big pregnant girl who screamed for help for me the night before, when I fainted.

She looked at me and asked, “Are you all right?”

Her entire face was covered in huge red pimples or boils. I'd never seen anything like it; it jolted me enough to have to turn away.

I looked at the ground and said, “Yes, thank you.”

She walked past me and hollered, “That's okay. I'm a good screamer.”

The cafeteria didn't smell as disgusting in the morning. There were toasters and bags of bread and little boxes of cereal next to
small cartons of milk. I grabbed a box of Froot Loops, sat at the far end of the bench, away from the other girls, and ate slowly. On my way out, the girl with the red hoop earrings stuck her leg out in front of me. I stopped before I got to it. She smiled and said, “Don't trip, girl.”

My heart was pounding; all I wanted to do was get the hell out. I showed the guard my pass and she buzzed me out. I walked as fast as I could without running. I got all the way to the main road thinking, hoping, I would find a sign of life besides the facility, of the normal world I'd left behind. But once I got to the road, all I could see for miles and miles were trees and snow. It was pure nothing. I could scream and shout and no one would hear me. I felt as small as I could ever remember feeling as I stared out at the trees.

It reminded me of summer camp, which was also in the middle of the same kind of nowhere, tree-filled Indiana. I went three years in a row. I stayed for four weeks each time, and I loved almost every second of it. It's where I learned how to canoe, shoot a gun, and whistle “Dixie” with crackers in my mouth. I jumped off swings into the lake, made lanyards, and sang ridiculously stupid songs. They blared the most amazing rendition of “Taps” every night for the whole camp, through loudspeakers hidden way up above the cabins in the forest, before we went to bed. “Taps” was the most beautiful piece of music I'd ever heard. In the mornings, the same speakers blared the suddenly not-so-beautiful “Reveille” to let us know it was time to get out of bed and begin another day.

The last year I'd gone to camp I was twelve years old. I got a letter from my mother about midway through the session, telling me that our family was thinking of moving to a new house. Enclosed in the letter was a picture she'd drawn on a small piece of paper of a bedroom with a bed, a desk, and a dressing table. At the top of the page she'd written:

I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe they would consider moving while I was
gone
. I didn't know what could be going on at home. Everything was fine when I left. My dad had been traveling a little more than usual, but otherwise things were normal. The idea that our family was actually going to move was unthinkable. I crumpled the letter up and tried to forget it ever arrived. As camp came to an end a few weeks later, I received another letter from my mother saying that she looked forward to seeing me when I returned. She said someone would be there at the Winnetka community house to meet the camp bus and drive me home when I got back.

After the long drive home on the crowded bus, we arrived at the Winnetka community house. All of the other parents were waiting for their children in the parking lot. I spotted a black car from my dad's company parked near the front, with a driver I'd never met. He walked up, grabbed my trunk, and told me I could get in the car. I climbed into the back of the black Town Car, wondering where the heck my parents were. There were two
Playboy
magazines stuck in the flap just in front of my knees behind the driver's seat. I was creeped out and wondered why they were there; were they my dad's? The driver headed the wrong way on Winnetka Avenue.

I spoke up. “Um . . . I think you're going the wrong way. Our house is the other way.”

“You moved. You live in Northfield now; it's just at the other end of Winnetka.” Seriously? Were they kidding—new house, new town even? I was stunned and didn't know what to think as the car drove past the lush suburban lawns. The fancy streetlights and the set-back houses were always a shock when you'd been gone for a while. Winnetka was, as it always was, beautiful. We pulled onto a street I'd never seen, called Sunset Ridge Road, and then into a driveway. The tires crunched over gravel as we pulled all the way in. Then it was quiet. The house was white, with two stories, and a big front yard. There were no lights on. Was this the right house?
There were no cars, no signs of life. The driver had carried my trunk to the door before I even got out of the car.

“Have a good night, Miss Pryor,” he said. I looked up at the strange white house, which was completely different from our old house, where I'd lived most of my life. It was totally surreal. Like I was in a strange dream where you recognize things from your life, but they're totally out of context.

I walked up the stone pathway toward the door. Next to the path was a cement statue of a lion sitting on its hind legs with a ring in its mouth. It
was
our house; I knew that lion; that was our statue from the old house, except the ring in its mouth was now broken, and it was leaning lopsided up against a bush. The door was unlocked. Inside, first thing I saw was my little sister's green umbrella on the floor. There was our desk, and my dad's boat paintings, and our rug, the one my mom got in Mexico. My grandfather's medals in the glass frames were on the wall, and the yellow-and-white-striped couches now looked much bigger in what appeared to be the living room. The staircase had all sorts of half-folded laundry, toys, and schoolbooks strewn about. Yep, this was our house. I stepped down a small step to the kitchen. Dishes were piled up in the sink, and there was a lot of mud on the floor. I looked out the window over the sink, and through the dark I saw a sprawling backyard with a few tree swings. I did love swings. . . . I eventually made my way up the stairs in search of my room. Where were my mom, my dad, and my sisters and brothers? It was utterly quiet, and I was starting to worry. I found a small bedroom with bunk beds and saw that the floor was crammed with boxes. When I looked at the beds, I saw my little twin sisters, sleeping.

I shook Jennifer's shoulder. She turned and with a sleepy smile said, “Hi, Liz.” Her face was a surprising comfort to me.

“Hi, Jen. Where's Mom?”

“She's gone. She's been gone for two days.”

“Two days? Where's Dad?”

“Downtown, I think.”

“Where did Mom go, Jen?”

“We don't know.” She closed her eyes and then opened them again. “Your room's next to ours.”

I peeked up at Tory sleeping soundly in the bunk above. They were nine years old. I looked into the room next door and knew it had to be mine. All my Laura Ingalls Wilder books were on the shelf, and my Madame Alexander dolls were in a box on the floor. I checked in the drawers and boxes for my things—it was all here—and found my locked diary at the bottom of a shoe box. I went to the box that had the beautiful dolls I'd been collecting since first grade. They were all historical female icons of some sort, with brilliant handmade dresses. I had Betsy Ross; Amy, Meg, and Jo from
Little Women;
and Cleopatra. But I was searching for Scarlett O'Hara specifically. I finally saw the green ribbon from her straw hat poking out of some tissue. I lifted up her green-and-white-flowered dress and the crinoline underneath and took off her tiny black velvet shoe with a real snap on it. I checked inside the fancy white lace sock and found what I was looking for: my diary key. Thank God! I couldn't stop wondering where my mother was; why hadn't someone picked me up at the bus? I had a bad feeling in my stomach that night. I woke up early the next morning and made my way down the strange stairs. I found Dorothy in the kitchen.

“
Mom
, hi, where have you been?”

“Hi, Liz. Welcome home, darling. I was walking.”

“Walking? What do you mean walking?”

“I don't know, just walking, honey. I needed some air.”

One of the twins, sitting eating cereal and reading the back of the box, chimed in.

“Yep, for a whole day and a night and another day.” She rolled her eyes at me behind Dorothy's back.

“Mom, you left them here that long?”

She ignored me. “I'm sorry I couldn't be there to pick you up at the bus, but I'm glad you're home, Liz.”

Everything was upside down that summer. My older sisters
were in high school, busy and preoccupied with their boyfriends and teenage stuff. I barely saw them. My brothers were working, and gone most of the time. And I hadn't seen my dad in weeks. I got the feeling most of my siblings knew that my parents' marriage was breaking up. No one told me anything, but I overheard my brothers talking once, late at night on the boat, about my dad moving away from the family. I hadn't actually heard the word
divorce
, but I wondered if that wasn't what was happening. The thought made me sick. I couldn't imagine my life without my dad there.

A couple weeks after my return from camp, on a wicked humid summer morning, I was awoken very early by a loud, grunting, shrieking noise. After sitting up in my bed, in my still-new bedroom, I listened again as it got louder. I made my way down the hall toward the sound, which was clearly coming from the master bedroom. I slowly opened the door. I saw my mother in her underwear and a button-down shirt, kneeling down on the carpet. The mattress from her bed was cockeyed on the floor. With all her strength, it appeared she was trying to fold the mattress or roll it up. She had a bunch of my dad's ties and belts on the floor beside her. The mattress was five times the size of her small frame. I shut the door and stood in the hallway for another few moments, terrified, and then decided to go in and see if I could help. When she saw me she screamed loudly, like a crazy woman: “GET OUT, GET OUT OF MY ROOM.” I froze until she started again, and then I ran out of the room. I'd never ever seen her that way. A few minutes later my sisters woke up and came to see what was going on. When I told them, they decided to go in themselves, and sure enough Dorothy shouted again, loudly and with vengeance, “LEAVE ME ALONE AND GET OUT!”

We had no idea what we should do. I thought about calling our grandfather, but Dorothy might have become even crazier, so we stayed out of her room. She stayed in the room with the door shut the whole day and never came out. She spent hours rolling up the
mattress from her bed; it was nothing short of miraculous. Finally she got the mattress rolled up and tied with my dad's ties and belts. With all her five feet and two inches of strength, she shoved that queen mattress out the small second-story window of her bedroom. Yes, she pushed and shoved and tweaked and pushed and tweaked until the mattress made its way through the opening and floated down from the second story of our new house onto the ground. I watched it fall from the kitchen window downstairs. When it hit the ground in the backyard, I ran upstairs and there she stood, short of breath, sweaty, and quiet, still in the button-down shirt and her underwear.

“Mom, what the heck? Why did you
do
that?”

She paused and then answered, “Why, sweetheart? Because I had
seven
children with your father on that mattress and I wanted it out of my room and out of my life, and now it is.” My mom and dad got divorced at the end of that summer.

chapter
3

I
made my way down the path, back through the cold wintry trees. It was almost one o'clock and it was Tuesday, which meant I had to be back for my appointment with the social worker woman, Ms. Graham.

“Thank you for being on time, Liz. Have you ever been to a social worker before?”

“No.” I looked around the office and saw the empty chair my mom had sat in a few days earlier, when she dropped me off, which felt like a lifetime ago. Ms. Graham kept talking.

“We're just going to talk. I'm here to help you along if you have anything on your mind.”

“Okay.”

“I spoke with your mother this morning and told her about your fainting spell. She was very concerned but I assured her you and the baby are doing fine now. How are you feeling?”

“Fine.”

“She said she'd let your father know and keep him informed.”

I looked out the little window in her office. “No, she won't.”

“She said she would.”

“But she won't.”

“Why not?”

“They don't speak.”

“I see. Why is that?”

I paused. “They hate each other.”

“That's an awfully strong term.”

“I know.”

I didn't want to get into it with Ms. Graham, but the simple truth was that my father had asked my mother for a divorce the day before I got home from camp that summer, just after we moved to the new house. That was when she walked for two days. Some months later my parents divorced. And after that my dad married a woman who used to work for him. From then on, for the last five years, my parents hadn't spoken. It was a radically difficult time for all of us. I was waiting for things between my parents to calm down, for our lives to become easier, or find some new version of normal. But nothing ever really changed. Nothing between them, or around them, got easier. What I felt like was that I couldn't love my dad when I was around my mom, and I couldn't love my mom when I was around my dad. The two people who had been sitting in the same place in my heart my whole life were now forcing me to hold them in two different places.

“Are they divorced?”

“Yes.”

“That's hard.”

“Yeah, hard for my mom.”

Our mom was completely shattered when our dad left—not the regular kind of shattered,
brutally
shattered from head to toe. Like someone-stuck-a-hand-down-her-throat-pulled-her-heart-out-and-threw-it-against-a-moving-train shattered. And that was only the beginning. I'd been slowly learning some truths about life over the past few years. I knew that one brief moment at any
given time could destroy how a person exists in the world. Almost like the earth stops rotating just for a second, and the force of the stop pulls everything that's good away . . . and some people never find their way back. My brothers and sisters and I were right there watching when the earth stopped rotating for our mom. She loved our father; she loved him so much she waited for years for him to come back. She quit smoking—“gave it up to God,” she said—so that he might bring our dad home, but Lee never came back. It's a rare anguish for a child to watch the person they love the most in the world suffer so profoundly, especially when there's no way to help. I listened to my mom's sadness through the walls of my bedroom almost every night before I went to sleep, for years after Lee left. Some nights it made me so sad I wept along with her from my own bed.

Ms. Graham looked at me a long time and then asked, “Was the divorce hard for you?”

“Kind of . . . Yes. I miss my dad.”

“How often do you see him?”

“Not very much.”

“Your parents don't speak at all?”

“No, they don't. But a few days ago they had to.”

• • • •

Lee's classic wooden schooner, the
Malabar X
, built in 1930, moved our dad to a place I only saw when we were sailing. It was like a peek at the underbelly of his soul, where joy, and ease, and purpose all came together at the same time. Our time with our dad on the boat was unlike anything else.

Ten days before I arrived at the facility, my dad had taken some of us kids and his new wife on vacation to the British Virgin Islands. We cruised through the crystal-clear waters for ten incredible days. The Caribbean was an amazingly beautiful place. We took turns at the helm, trimmed the sails, dodged jellyfish, and caught starfish. We pretended to be pirates, counted stars, and
shaved our legs in buckets of freshwater on the deck. We bought muffins and bread from little kids and their dads in old wooden dinghies motoring around the harbors in the mornings. Some of our greatest times together as a family were spent sailing, navigating small living quarters with too many siblings, and talking our heads off about things we might never have discussed under other circumstances. The confines of the boat were part of the beauty of sailing. And I was pretty sure that's what our dad had in mind.

Every day on the Caribbean, I found a different secret spot to sit, and be alone; in furled sails, out on the bowsprit, in the corners of the cockpit, and down below deck. It was on the water where I really learned how to be alone. That trip I spent a lot of time thinking about my life, how much I'd done and seen, and how quickly it was passing. I was seventeen years old, and I would be leaving for college soon. Everything was about to change and open up in a new way. It was the most exhilarating feeling I could remember ever having. Life was going to turn, and I was ready.

One particular day, partway through the vacation, we were all hanging around on the hot deck, sunburned and full to the brim with our lunch of delicious freshly caught yellow tuna. I noticed my dad's new wife staring at me. She smiled a couple times when I looked over, but I didn't think much about it. Later that afternoon, I was down below deck feeling terribly seasick, which was unusual for me. I was sitting alone in the main salon when I noticed the new wife making her way down the ladder in her yellow string bikini. She smiled and asked if she could join me. I could smell the rich Bain de Soleil oil she had slathered all over her tanned body.

She sat quietly with me for a bit before she very casually asked, “Is there any way you could be pregnant, Liz?”

The words clashed in my brain. Pregnant? I thought about it. I mean I couldn't actually be pregnant—with a baby in my body? No way. The thought had crossed my mind, but not exactly. Not in the real kind of way. I excused myself from the couch to get sick in the bathroom again. I pumped and flushed the little toilet, rinsed
my mouth, and when I came out she was still sitting there, waiting, with her pretty hair.

“Do you remember when you last got your period, Lizzie?”

“No. I only got my first period like a year and a half ago, and it never really comes every month, so . . . I don't know. I haven't had it in a long time.”

“Have you had sex with your boyfriend?”

“Yes.” Holy crap, yes, but not in the we're-going-to-have-sex planned kind of way. More in the it-went-too-far kind of way. We'd never even talked about it. About what happened. Maybe if my boyfriend Daniel and I had talked about it, discussed it, or planned it, it wouldn't have gone so far. It would have made it more real than it felt in the moment.

“I think it would be a good idea to take you to a doctor. You're probably not pregnant but we should make sure, huh?” My whole body felt numb as the reality of what she was saying hit.

“What doctor?”

“I have a doctor you could see; we could go when we get back. We don't have to say anything to your dad just yet.” She was so calm and nice, but I started to panic. I wanted to know right then that I wasn't pregnant; the idea of it was too big to process. How could I have ignored my growing stomach, and this new nausea? How could I have been so stupid? A new, overwhelming reality was sinking in. The wife said she wouldn't mention anything to my dad. She was such a nice lady, which made it hard to hate her, and I wanted to hate her . . . for my mom. She handed me some saltines, stroked my hair, and sauntered the French bikini back up the ladder. She was young, and really cool, and looked remarkably like Farrah Fawcett.

We left the Caribbean after ten days and arrived back in Chicago late at night. Dorothy was asleep when we returned. I was supposed to go to school the next day. I'd already missed two days because of our vacation. I could barely function, living with the notion that I might be pregnant. A hellish fury of fear was taking
over. I got up early the next morning, dressed, and left the house so I wouldn't have to see my mom or anyone. I was sweating even though it was freezing cold that day. I drove downtown to meet the new wife at her doctor's office. They did a pregnancy test and then the doctor put an instrument on my stomach that sounded exactly like the ocean, like the crashing of the waves against the boat when we sailed. We heard a thump, swoosh, thump, swoosh, thump, swoosh. The doctor and Farrah Fawcett looked at each other, and then the doctor said to me: “That sound . . . is the heartbeat of a baby.”

What? What the fuck?
I pushed his hand away from my body and went into some sort of shock. I couldn't speak; I could barely breathe.

The wife called my dad and told him to meet us at their apartment in the city, right after the doctor's appointment. I was still in disbelief. How had I let it come to this? How did the wife figure this out before me? We sat down in the fancy living room with my dad and the wife, whose name was actually Kate, and she told him I was pregnant. My father looked at me a long time, and then out the window over the buildings at Lake Michigan, and then told me he was really sorry for me; he was sorry for the situation. He was sad—really sad. I'd never seen him like that, and it ripped hard at me. I didn't know Lee even had that kind of emotion inside. I knew what a massive disappointment this was. I knew that
I
had made him feel this unbearable unhappiness. It was unforgivable. My dad stood up and said he'd have to call my mother. He was going to ask her to come downtown to meet us at his and Kate's apartment, which threw me into a complete tailspin.

“No, Dad, please no. I will tell Mom myself. I'll drive home right now and tell her, and then call you.” My mother and father hadn't really spoken since the divorce. And my mother had never met the Farrah Fawcett wife, and I didn't want her to have to endure all of that because of me.

“That will not do, Diz,” my father said. “She needs to come here and we will all talk about it and figure out the plan.”

“Dad, we can do that tomorrow at a restaurant or something, but please don't do this. Don't have her come here. I think that would be really hard for her. Please.”

“Stop it, Liz, that's ridiculous. Your mother is a grown woman. I'm going in to call her.” I kept begging, but he turned around sharply and told me to sit down, which I did. I always did what he asked; that's who I was.

My mom arrived an hour later. She was wearing her black pencil skirt, with black pumps, a navy blue wool coat with brass buttons, and a paisley silk scarf around her neck, composed like always. But the look on her face will remain fixed in my memory forever. I watched Dorothy take in the elegant apartment with its floor-to-ceiling windows. She looked at the walls, the carpet, the lush upholstered furniture, the life my dad was living without her, and then stopped at the astounding view of the city and Lake Michigan out the window. And finally she looked at me, and I wanted to disappear. She didn't know yet.

I remember the moments before he told her, thinking to myself, The second my mother knows it will all become real. My hell, my pain, the reality of my shame will begin. I don't know why that was true, but it was. She sat down in an overstuffed chair in the living room, keeping on her coat. Maybe she didn't think she'd need to stay long. I was on the couch and my dad was in another big chair, and we formed a triangle. Farrah Fawcett sashayed into the room wearing a short flowery dress and cowboy boots. Oh God, I thought, she's here in front of my mom. She smiled and offered us beverages. I could barely watch. My mother managed a soft Katharine Hepburn “Helllllloo.” There was a framed picture of my dad, the wife, and the wife's four-year-old daughter on the table next to the couch. Dorothy noticed it and then looked back out the window. It was excruciating: to watch my mom seeing my dad together with his new wife, seeing their home, their contentment together.

Lee wasted no time. He wore his blue-and-white pin-striped Brooks Brothers button-down, khaki pants, and soft leather loafers,
and had his vodka with a splash of soda next to him on the table. He looked at my mom—everything about him attractive—and began, “Dorothy, our daughter—the daughter
you
live with every single day of your life—is more than four months pregnant.” There was a long pause. My mother didn't move. My dad continued, never raising his voice: “How in the world can that be? Do you see nothing? You don't know when or if your own daughter gets her period, or gains weight, or throws up? What the hell is going on in that house?”

My mom was staring past Farrah Fawcett, out the huge plate glass windows; her face was surrendered, her eyes blank. Kate was uncomfortably messing with the tray of drinks. I could not hold back the tears. The tears came for a million reasons: I was pregnant, it was now indisputably real, and my father was torturing my mother, stabbing her with a horrible knife of blame, turning it over and over again. I couldn't believe what was happening—and all because of me. I let out an audible cry. My mother turned to me with a look I'd never seen and a voice I'd rarely heard, strong and cold.

“Pull yourself together, Liz, and
stop
crying.” Then, with what I'm sure was the last shred of dignity she could find, she politely asked Farrah Fawcett to leave the room.

Kate stood up and said, “Of course.”