My Life So Far (11 page)

When I got home that afternoon I found Mother in her bedroom and asked, “Mom, what does ‘sex you up’ mean?” I’m not certain it happened this way, but what I remember was that before my eyes, she seemed to go into a sort of slow-motion meltdown. Mouth open, she stammered. But I don’t think she actually said anything. Maybe she said, “Later, Lady,” or, “Go ask your sister.” I know I left her room as uneducated as I went in, and even more curious as to the meaning of those words. Up I went to Pan’s room. She didn’t seem surprised at all and proceeded to go into scatological detail about who puts what into which hole, followed by, “And then the boy goes pee pee,” and so on—followed by a description of how babies come out. What I was seeing in my mind, though, was the image of what had been hanging down underneath Pedro that day on the hill and somehow trying to put that together with my own “down there” and pee pee and . . . well, I was horrified. I had to go sit in my room for a long time and take deep breaths just to settle down from this terrifying but titillating revelation. I don’t remember much else about that year of my life, but I remember every single word Pan said that afternoon.

Within days our governess appeared with a book about where babies come from. It had drawings of the fallopian tubes, uterus, and penis. My mother, like so many mothers and fathers still today, was so out of touch with where I was emotionally and developmentally that she thought a mere mention of the word
sex
meant I needed to know all about the plumbing and mechanics. What I really needed was for her to sit me down, put her arm around me, and ask about where I had heard the expression
sex you up.
Then she would have realized that I needed to know about
feelings,
not mechanics; that I was jealous and hurt and thinking that I wasn’t good enough to be the one that the boy wanted to “sex up.” An understanding hug from her right then would have helped. And then she might have said, “He probably doesn’t know what it means, either. He probably heard some man say it and thought it sounded grown-up. It doesn’t mean he loves that girl and doesn’t like you. It’s just that this is a time when you begin to have new feelings kind of all stirred up inside when you’re around a boy or girl you really like. Have you had feelings like that?” Then I would have felt safe to say, “Yes, I have those feelings around
that
boy and that’s why it felt bad when he said that to the other girl,” and she and I would have talked about those feelings and how beautiful and how natural they are—a part of growing up.

But though others may have seen Mother as “the one you’d go to if you had a problem,” that’s not the mother I knew. If it had gone down that way, I would have been able to come to her the following year, when
really
scary things began to happen. But as it was, I never asked her another sensitive question again.

I
t seemed there’d be a new nanny every few months; none were helpful in the sex-and-feelings department. On the contrary, one of them was very religious. Every morning she would come into my room before I was out of bed and smell my fingers to see if I’d had my hands “down there.” She made it clear that pleasuring oneself was a mortal sin.

The next nanny was young and pretty and had a boyfriend in the army. One afternoon when he was home on leave, she brought him into the bathroom when I was taking a bath. She asked me to get out of the tub, and when I did, I remember her turning me around. I felt scared. But I have no memory beyond that. I do not know if he molested me, but something bad must have happened around that time, because that was when I began to behave differently and have recurring fantasies in which I either watched or participated in sexually disturbing, even violent, acts. This was also when I began to feel terrible anxiety whenever I saw public displays of sexuality—people necking in movies or smooching on the beach. This anxiety lasted into my fifties, and I do not know why. Could it be that as a child I saw something I shouldn’t have? Did something happen with that nanny’s boyfriend? I also began getting into trouble at school. I was caught getting a girl to pull down her pants and show me her wee-wee. I was sent to the principal’s office for a “good talking-to.” This was about the time when I said the f-word, the same period that Mother was having her affair with Joe Wade. I mention these experiences because during much of my life, issues of sexuality and gender have been a source of trouble and anxiety (as they are for many women and girls). That is why today I help young girls and boys work on these same things.

O
n August 6, 1945, the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Dad was ordered back to the States the same day that Japan surrendered and was subsequently awarded a Bronze Star. Like a lot of men, he came back from the war changed. He had been living a man’s life with his war buddies, unencumbered by family responsibilities. I think he liked the sense of mission, the male bonding, being a success at something real instead of just a screen hero.

In fifth grade with my braids.

After he came home, I sensed that Dad was not attracted to Mother anymore. She seemed not to be conscious of it, however, and would walk around naked in front of him. I wanted her to put her clothes on. Didn’t she know? She was probably still very beautiful, but—oh, I hate myself for this betrayal of her—I saw her through my father’s judgmental eyes. As an adolescent, I would recognize Dad’s eyes sizing me up unfavorably. I blamed Mother for the growing distance that I sensed between her and Dad. She wasn’t doing the right things to make him love her. And what it said to me was that unless you were perfect and very careful, it was not safe being a woman.
Side with the man if you want to be a survivor.
Go out there and listen to jazz with them and pour them their whiskey and even bring them women, if that’s what they want, and learn to find that exciting. Be better than perfect if you want to be loved. And don’t walk around naked.

A
sad memory from those postwar days was the afternoon I decided to get a book and read next to Dad. Like his father before him, Dad was an avid reader and would sit reading for hours in a big overstuffed chair. My own reading skills had been honed during the years he was away, and I thought reading would be something we could share that didn’t require talking. I got the novel
Black Beauty
and sat in a chair opposite him. He hadn’t acknowledged my presence, but when I came to a passage that made me want to laugh, instead of stifling the laughter I encouraged it, hoping he’d ask me to share with him what was so funny. But he never looked up or said anything. It was as though I weren’t even there. I’d known he loved me when I was little, but now, at nine, I wasn’t so sure.

I
n 1947 Dad left for New York to begin rehearsals for a Broadway play called
Mister Roberts,
directed by Joshua Logan and produced by Leland Hayward, Brooke’s father. Right after that, Brooke came to Tigertail to tell me that her parents were getting divorced. It was the most frightening thing I’d ever heard. If it could happen to that family, where everyone was always laughing and having fun, then . . . No, too frightening to think about.

That was in the beginning of my tenth year. By the time we rounded the circle to the bottom of that year, the end of my first decade, we’d be living in Greenwich, Connecticut—and life as I’d known it would never be the same.

CHAPTER FIVE

WHERE’D I GO?

I was doing research in a an elementary, middle, and high school and sometimes we would thank the students by getting them pizza for lunch. When I would ask the girls what they wanted on their pizzas, the ten-year-olds would say, “Extra cheese with pepperoni,” the thirteen-year-olds would say, “I don’t know,” and the fifteen-year-olds would say, “Whatever.”

—C
ATHERINE
S
TEINER
-A
DAIR
, ED.D.,
Full of Ourselves: Advancing Girl Power,
Health and Leadership.

P
EOPLE MADE A FUSS
over us as we waited backstage in the darkened theater where my father was starring in
Mister Roberts.
We had just landed in New York that night in early June 1948, and Mother, Peter, and I had been driven directly to the Alvin Theater.

Standing next to the stage manager, Peter and I waited for intermission to release our father to us. As I peered around the curtains I saw—was it a stage or a sliver of heaven? It was so close yet far away, bathed in light, awash in an electric energy that crackled back and forth between an unseen audience and Dad in his khaki lieutenant’s uniform. But he wasn’t “Dad.” He was a funny, talkative Mr. Roberts. Even the gunmetal gray of the set, the decks, antiaircraft guns, and turrets of the navy destroyer, seemed to glow from within. No wonder he’d left us to come to this place: Here he was more alive than life, the eye in the center of a hurricane of love and laughter.

Suddenly there was thunderous applause. People began running around backstage, and before I knew it, Dad was next to me giving me a big hug and I could feel some of the energy he’d picked up out there coming through his uniform right into me, along with a heady wave of his musk smell. I didn’t want to leave, ever. But he and Mother said it was late and that we had to go to bed. So we hugged again and made the thirty-five-minute drive to Greenwich, Connecticut, our new hometown.

Peter was disconsolate at having to leave Tigertail, and rancor fairly oozed from his every pore. While I knew that the days of buckskin and bareback with Sue Sally were over, to me, it felt—at least initially—rather like an adventure. Besides, pragmatist that I am, I always meet necessity with enthusiasm. What was I to do, beg Sue Sally’s mother to adopt me? No, my connection to Dad, fragile though it sometimes felt, was still my lifeline, and I wasn’t about to put it to a test. I was forever amazed at Peter’s willingness to test everybody all the time. How was he so sure the bonds wouldn’t fray and break?

I slept late that first morning and the sun was fully up when I jumped out of bed and threw open my window. Below me was an apple orchard that stretched farther than I could see. On either side was what appeared to be a jungle. I realized that the astounding array of greens in my colored-pencil case weren’t invented by the pencil company; they were right there below me. I never got dressed so fast, and I was downstairs and out the door. The sound of the door slamming behind me made me do a double take: my first screen door—there were no mosquitoes in California. New too was the heaviness of the air that made my skin wet before I’d even had a chance to sweat—humidity. Whoa, this new place was going to be great!

The grounds seemed enormous, probably because there were no fences to mark the property. Dense hardwood forests and swamps surrounded us on three sides. By the end of the day, I had explored what seemed to be miles of steamy forest. Along the front of the property, separating the orchard from the road, was an old wall made from stacked, lichen-covered rocks without any mortar. Here and there granite boulders poked up through the lush green grasses. I had never seen rocks like these. In my California mountains, the boulders were sandstone—which could be dramatic, like a herd of elephants huddled together—but didn’t have shiny grains of mica and veins of quartz and didn’t seem to carry the history of the earth itself, the way these Greenwich rocks did. I fell in love with rocks that summer. Even today, the sight of an old Connecticut stone wall makes me happy.

A whole new environment suddenly became mine that first Greenwich summer and was like a salve on the wounds of the various illnesses and broken bones that began to manifest themselves as the tensions between my father and mother became more and more palpable. That was also when I started to bite my fingernails down to the bleeding quick. Mother made me sleep wearing white cotton gloves. She put bitter-tasting stuff on the ends of my fingers. She got neighbors to talk to me about how, like hairballs in cats, the chewed nails would create a ball in my stomach and make me sick. But nothing could get me to stop the nail biting, since nothing spoke to the
reasons
I was doing it. Same reasons I was getting sick so much.