The Angry Woman Suite (35 page)

We were scrub, that was my assessment. We were sagebrush.

Forty kids lived on Morningstar Street. I was the oldest. All the mothers stayed at home—it was rare for mothers to have outside jobs back then—and all the fathers worked at Convair. Daddy implored Mother to
not
go out looking for work. Think how it would reflect on him as a provider, he said, and Mother acquiesced, but only after stipulating that the monthly Social Security benefit on behalf of the minor children of Stephen Eric Bowden be made a part of the household fund—an amount fortuitously the same as the new Grayson house payment. In turn, Daddy insisted on officially adopting me and Bean. He said we were turning over a new leaf, a phrase that practically made Mother fall all over herself, loving Daddy for turning Bean and me into legitimate Graysons. And once Bean and I were legal Graysons, the next thing Daddy did was make us
official
Roman Catholics, something he implemented with as much fervor as he had in taking us away from Papa.

There were two Baptist families on Morningstar, and two families that were nothing at all. The other families were Catholic, and Daddy, touched by the hand of God as he’d been, yet nonetheless praying steadily to Saint Philomena, Daddy’s patron saint for steady nerves, “for insurance,” was elected president of the Holy Name Society. He volunteered to wrest the ten percent tithe from parishioners less pious than himself, and our second year in San Diego he won the Knights of Columbus award for Catholic Layman of the Year. Mostly, though, Daddy was head denigrator of the two Baptist families and the other “un-Godlies” (the nothing-at-all’s) on Morningstar. Still, we were called upon to remember that Baptists were not bad people, he said; they were merely misled. We were called upon to be loving and kind neighbors.

And so it came to pass that Daddy and Mother became the kindest, most loving of neighbors, the backbone of Morningstar Street, the high priest and prioress of good works: Diana Grayson, beautiful and charming, the quintessential wife, mother and housekeeper; and her handsome husband, Francis, a man who’d give you the shirt off his back. The Graysons, everybody said, were
the
class act. And talent! Mr. and Mrs. Grayson had more talent than they knew what to do with, playing the trumpet and piano together, doors and windows wide open: built-in entertainment for those neighbors congregating on front porches on summer nights. Even the Grayson offspring were immaculate and well-behaved, although the youngest was a bit
too
quiet. Had anyone ever actually heard her speak? And the eldest, the one with her nose always in a book, although polite and well-spoken, had a snotty air about her. But other than that, perfect.

Our neighbors couldn’t know about the things Daddy said about them behind their backs, and while I never gave Daddy too many passes in life, I was sure he meant none of it meanly, because his nerves, bolstered by Mother Church,
had
become sturdy as bricks. Daddy
was
mostly benevolent, then. And Mother had evened out after moving to Morningstar too, focusing on the role all the mothers seemed to set so much store by: being good housewives. But my mother didn’t look at all like the other mothers in Pacific Gardens, who wore muu-muus and Keds, and curlers in public. My mother wore capri pants, shiny black flats, and bright scarves around her neck even while scrubbing the toilet. Her hairdo varied according to the day of the week: bouffant flips, pageboys, French twists. For church she pulled out all the stops in linen sheaths, stockings and heels, gloves and hat, and three strands of pearls. Always three strands. Mother was like a movie star, and I watched, disdainful
and
envious, at the way everyone’s eyes followed her walking up that church aisle.

I was plain by contrast, and Bean was plainer. But everybody was plain next to my mother, and I told myself I didn’t mind being plain. Being a beneficiary of the absence of nerves stretched to a breaking point, with life settling into a predictable pattern, my anger and resentment had started curling up inside me, into a soft, closed circle where they slept and stayed asleep, undisturbed for several years, not wanting anything to do with appearances or change ever again.

Unrealistic, of course. What’s life without change?—but it was just a slight tremor that signaled our next one. Hardly noticeable. In fact, it was only in thinking back that I even recalled the tremor, and let me make this clear: I’ll maintain to the death that this shift was not related to the over-predicted bitchiness due to descend on my pre-pubescent personality (as Daddy would have you believe), as it was to the changes happening within Daddy’s church. Meaning things were moving out of Daddy’s sphere of comfort.

The Second Vatican Council had begun, and it would run three years, “ripping asunder” Daddy’s precious liturgy. The oft-quoted phrase, “empowerment of laity,” set Daddy’s teeth on edge, but the big kicker would be the Council’s declaration that “all justified by faith in baptism” were members of the Body of Christ, with the right to be called Christian and brothers of Catholics—an edict that would pretty much blow Daddy’s judgment of Baptists as “un-Godlies” out of the water. And no one, not even Mother Church, could expect to abandon Daddy and not have to dodge some kind of fallout.

Daddy took to having a second large glass of wine at dinner, and then a third and a fourth, all the while loudly proclaiming the Council a sham, a submission, masterminded by Masonic infiltrates, and when Mother began sighing, conveying her indignation, Daddy, by then thick-tongued and interpreting those sighs as signs to hold forth further, slurred his hatred for rock and roll, sassy-mouths, fatheads, Baptists, windbags, politicians, people with money, Masons—naturally—and all points of view other than his own.

Mother and Daddy stopped making music together. A
very
big sign. Could hardly be missed.

But because I’d been living underground for so long, sleepily burrowing out a semblance of comfort, I didn’t bear the full brunt of Daddy’s wrath right away. And it
really
was so slow, our family’s transition back to upheaval—and to tell the truth, it was just easier
not
to put stock in “signs.” Eventually, though, my slumber was arrested by Daddy’s wine-fueled diatribes, and although dull with laziness and wobbly at my awakening, I stretched out to my full height: tall, like Papa. And I listened carefully, cataloguing everything Daddy said, trust draining from reopened wounds. My Biloxi wounds.

Daddy began noticing the looks I gave him. And that’s when our old paradigm roared back to life.

“You,”
he accused one Saturday night at dinner. We’d just returned from church, from offering up our weekly confessions. Daddy was looking at Bean, but he was talking at
me.
He’d had way too much wine, and Bean’s silence seemed to goad him—but it was really all about me and the looks I shot his way.

“Miss Highandmighty. Miss Too-good-for-this-family. Yes, you Elyse, I’m talking to you. Look at me when I’m talking to you.” The wine was a propellant, attempting to suck me into his rage, and I couldn’t help remembering the way he’d kicked my fingers off the edge of the bathtub in Biloxi, trying to drown my soul. I shivered glancing at Bean: she was ashen. Mother’s lips puckered with disapproval.

“I’m looking, Daddy,” I said, trying to sound unafraid.

He looked at me as if I were vomit.
“Piss!
You’re looking like a sassy-mouth!”

Mother got up from the table, deserting me, taking plates and slamming them down on the drain board—a move Daddy mistakenly took as a go-ahead.

“Wasn’t much of a penance tonight,” he said. “You spat it out and ran.”

I’d said a quick Our Father at the altar rail, followed by three Acts of Contrition; head bowed, the subservient penitent, outwardly anyway. Truth was I’d long ago given up categorizing sins, deeming it an unproductive task, taking me away from my books and solitary walks in the fields behind our house. I felt Papa there in those fields, and I felt
his
religion, unnamed and joyful.

“The penance was what Father Dickey gave me.”

Daddy’s lower lip quivered. It had been quivering quite a lot lately, a sure sign his nerves were worn down to nubs.

“Think you don’t sin?”
he suddenly shouted. “That you can just waltz into that confessional and tell the priest any goddamn thing you want? That five minutes of penance is going to do the trick?
That it will save you?”

I bowed my head—but not before Daddy’s hand went up.

“Nothing will save you, Miss Sassy-mouth! I’m all over you, Miss Sassy-mouth!”

And then his hand came down hard against my cheek, whipping my head to the side—and then again.
“I’ll
save you,”
he muttered as he battered me. “
I’ll save you. I’ll save you from being like them … from being like the women, those murdering whores …”

I tap-danced away from him, dodging blows, gasping, “Daddy, it’s okay, calm down, it’s okay, Daddy, stop—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, the neighbors,” Mother said.

Daddy paused. “I don’t want that for you,” he panted. “I don’t want you being like the women who raised me. And I don’t want you being like Rose, either. I want you to be a good girl, Elyse.”

What felt
massively
queasy back then has since, decades later, hardened into a painful reality, and it’s this: Daddy and I rode a see-saw together. One side seeking the other for momentum. Up, down, up, down. One day I was the cross he had to bear; the next day I was a good girl, “the best girl in the whole world,” bringing home excellent marks, making him proud. And I’d bask in that approval, all the while holding it at arm’s length, mindful it was like Mother’s wedding crystal, predisposed to shattering. But what Daddy so often saw in my understandable hesitance was cool indifference instead. No one but Papa had ever come close to reading me right, so I knew by the way Daddy gnawed his lower lip, looking at me, that he was believing me to be indifferent. But always, after one of our go-arounds, I’d turn the idea of love over in my mind, trying to figure out how to make Daddy feel better, so
my
life could be better, examining love until my head ached from trying to understand why I even cared about love, when loving was so much work.

Yet at other times, even when Daddy was sober and being kind, I could be devious. I’d set him up to get hurt, tapping into his insecurities, reminding him I had roots that were
not
his, feigning innocence, asking if he thought Mother still loved Stephen Eric, always rewarded by moist eyes and assurances that in all likelihood Mother
did
still love my real father.

“But ask me anything you want,” Daddy would always say after. “You can always come to me with what’s bothering you, Elyse.”

“I’m sorry,” I repeated now, making my voice smaller. Making myself small seemed to placate Daddy.

“You make me sick,” Daddy said thickly. “You waste the priest’s time,
and
you make me sick. You’ll send me over the edge someday.”

Daddy said I was to ask
real
forgiveness for wasting his time. I knew what to do.
Do it!

I tapped my chest with my fist three times. “Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.”

“Go!”
Daddy commanded.

I grabbed Bean by the hand and ran, taking solace in the fact that I’d escaped with only slaps and superficial cuts from Daddy’s saw-edge eyes. I looked back and saw Daddy go to Mother, standing at the sink doing dishes, nose stuck up in the air, which meant Daddy was in for a hard night of penance, ruining her dinner. Why did he ask for it? And then the
real
nagging question. Was
I
like Daddy in that respect too, always asking for it? Was that why, on my awakening, I’d felt this forever hungering? Was that what shot nerves felt like? Feeling starved to death?

So it
was
just a sliver of time, those near-idyllic days on Morningstar Street. Just long enough for the saplings in the parkways to spread their sparse wings over Pacific Garden’s sidewalks, for new shrubs and gardens to take root and flourish, and for my grandparents to drive down from Sacramento and share a few Christmases with us. Time enough for Bean and me to take our first plane rides to Sacramento, and time enough to finesse my propensity for keeping secrets, even keeping my fear of Daddy and his tirades about murders and the “whores” who’d raised him from Papa—unbelievable feats, considering Papa could generally see straight through cement. It was time enough for Aidan to make his first trip to California, and time enough for my fat grandmother’s smoking and obesity to catch up with her.

When Mother told me Grandma would be fine, she wouldn’t look at me, signaling she’d waltzed off to fairytale land and wasn’t to be disturbed. So I went to the fields behind our house where I’d always felt Papa’s comfort, and I obsessed to the nth degree about illness and dying. But the day I finally accepted my grandmother
was
going to die soon, I got little comfort from the fields because I knew Papa, loving my grandmother as he did, would slip away
with
her when she passed. And so day after day I went back to the fields, and I begged the sky, the trees and the meadow grasses to at least save Papa—but instead the place where I’d lodged Stephen Eric for safekeeping reopened. I looked inside that place and began again the story about my
real
father, talking to him in my head and making believe
he
was my stability, and not Papa and not Daddy and Mother, because Stephen Eric was already dead.

And being dead made a person as perennial as the sky.

Judging by the drawn-out sighs, cupboard doors getting slammed and dirty looks thrown my way, Mother was working herself into a whopper of a snit. I treaded carefully, lurking in doorways, trying to gauge the length and breadth of those sighs, on the alert for clues to what was setting her off. Best guess was it was Daddy, some stupid thing he’d said—but I had to be sure, because if it was something about me or Bean, Daddy would be looking to skin us alive. My stomach churned and my skin prickled with fear. Of what, I couldn’t say. Getting hit? I’d been hit a thousand times. I could handle getting hit. I was an expert at high-diving deep into my head when the belt came out, into that hazy place where the wicked snaps of leather on my shoulders, my legs, were echoes, nothing more. So if I felt no pain, what then,
exactly,
made me so afraid? Because
it
was out there? And
it
was something even more awful? And what was
it
, anyway?