My father worked behind closed doors inside the house, had a huge ancient Latin dictionary on a wrought-iron stand, spoke Spanish on the phone, and drank sherry and ate raw meat, in the form of chorizo, at five o'clock. Until the day in the yard with my playmate I thought this was what fathers did. Then I began to catalog and notice. They mowed lawns. They drank beer. They played in the yard with their kids, walked around the block with their wives, piled into campers, and, when they went out, wore joke ties or polo shirts, not Phi Beta Kappa keys and tailored vests.
The mothers were a different matter and I loved mine so fiercely that I never wanted to admit to envy there. I did note that my mother seemed more anxious and less concerned with makeup, clothes, and cooking than the other mothers did. I wished my mother were normal, like other moms, smiling and caring, seemingly, only for her family.
I saw a movie with my father one night on television, The Stepford Wives. My father loved it; it scared the hell out of me. I, ofncourse, thought my mother was Katharine Ross, the only real woman in a town where every wife was replaced with a perfect, automated robot of a wife. I had nightmares for months afterward. I may have wanted my mother to change but not to die and never, never to be replaced.
When I was little, I worried about losing my mother. She was often hidden behind the locked door of her bedroom. My sister or I would want her attention in the mornings. We would see our father leave her room and, as we approached, he would explain.
"Your mother has a headache this morning," he might say, or, "Your mother doesn't feel well. She'll be out in a while."
I learned that if I knocked anyway, after my father went downstairs and shut himself up in his study, where we were not allowed to disturb him, that my mother sometimes let me in. I would crawl into bed with her and make up stories or ask her questions.
She threw up in those days and I saw this once when my father hadn't thought to lock the door. When I went inside her bedroom, which had its own bathroom, I could see my father standing in the bathroom doorway with his back to me. I could hear my mother making horrible noises. I rounded the corner in time to see bright red vomit spewing from her mouth into the sink. She saw me staring at her, my eyes hip-level with my father and reflected back to her from the mirror in front of the sink. In her gagging, she pointed me out to my father, who shooed me out of the bedroom and locked the door. They fought later. "For Christ's sakes, Bud," my mother said, "you know well enough to lock the door."
My mother's pillows when I was little smelled like cherries. It was a sickeningly sweet smell. It was the same way my rapist smelled on the night of the rape. I would not admit to myself until years later that this was the smell of alcohol.
I like the story of how my parents met. My father was working at the Pentagon, a better paper-pusher than a soldier. (When, in basic training, he and an army buddy were ordered to scale a wall, he broke his partner's nose by stepping on it, instead of inside the stirrup of this man's hands.) My mother lived with her parents in Bethesda, Maryland, and worked first for National Geographic Magazine, and then The American Scholar.
The two of them were set up on a blind date. They hated each other. My mother thought my father was a "pompous ass," and after a double date with the two people who had set them up, they put the experience behind them.
But they met again a year later. They didn't hit it off exactly, but this time they didn't hate each other, and my father asked my mother out a second time. "Your father was the only one who would take the bus out from the capital and then walk the five miles from the last station to our house," my mother always pointed out. This endeared him to my grandmother, apparently, and eventually my parents wed.
By then my father had a Ph.D. in Spanish Literature from Princeton, and my parents moved to Durham, North Carolina, where he held down his first academic job at Duke University. It was there, alone all day and unable to make friends in this new place, that my mother's drinking took a turn: She began drinking secretly.
My mother had always been nervous; she never acclimated to her prescribed role as housewife. She would repeatedly tell my sister and me how lucky we were to be in our generation. We believed her. The fifties seemed horrible to us. Her father and mine had convinced her to leave her full-time job by emphasizing that a married woman didn't work.
She drank for less than a decade-but long enough for my sister and me to come into the world and have our childhoods. Long enough for my father to move up the academic ranks by taking promotions that took the two of them, and then the four of us, to Madison, Wisconsin; Rockville, Maryland; and, finally, Paoli, Pennsylvania.
By 1977, my mother had been sober for ten years. During this period, she began having things we called "flaps." Flaps were our name for when Mommy went crazy. If my father was an absence-sometimes literally gone to Spain for months-my mother was too much a presence. Her anxiety and panic was infectious, making every moment twice as long and twice as hard when she was under their sway. Unlike normal families, we could not trust that, having left to get food at the local supermarket, we would actually achieve our goal. Two steps into the store, she might begin to have a flap.
"Grab a cantaloupe or something," she would say as I got older, and thrust a bill into my hand. "I'll meet you in the car." She would hunch over during a flap and rapidly rub her breastbone to soothe what she described as her exploding heart. I would rush into the store to buy that cantaloupe and maybe something on sale near the front, wondering all the time, Will she make it to the car? Will she be all right?
In movies and in life, the burly men in white suits who stand on either side of a mental patient are nondescript and indistinguishable. So, in many ways, were my sister and I. Mary is absent from many of my memories because my mother and her illness are so dominant. When I remember, Oh, yeah, Mary was along on that ride, that's exactly how I see her: the other support for our always potentially collapsing mother.
Sometimes, Mary and I functioned as a caretaking unit. Mary would husband her to the car and I would grab the cantaloupe. But I watched my sister develop from a child who thought the world would fall apart to a young adult who resented how the flaps made us different, exciting stares and comments in public. "Stop rubbing your tits," she would hiss at my mother.
As Mary grew less and less sympathetic, I compensated and became the emotional overlord-soothing my mother and condemning my sister. When Mary helped, I was glad to have her there. When she whined and entered her own incipient version of my mother's panic, I shut her out.
The only memory I have of my father expressing physical affection for my mother was a brief kiss as we were dropping him off to catch a suburban limo to the airport, where he would embark on his annual academic trip to Spain. The reason for this isolated incident could come under the heading of "Let's Not Have a Scene." Simply, it was my prompting, then begging, then whining that brought on the kiss.
By then, I had begun to notice that unlike my parents, other couples touched each other, held hands, and kissed on cheeks.
They did this in supermarkets, walking around the block, at school occasions to which parents were invited, and in front of me, in their homes.
But it was the kiss my father gave that day upon my urging that let me know my parents' relationship, if solid, was certainly not passionate. He was, after all, leaving us for a number of months, as he did yearly, and I felt that, with an absence of that length, an expression of love was owed my mother.