The Beginning
An excerpt from The Bolter: A Memoir
My family believed in Dickens, root vegetables, ignoring difficult truths and Louis Kahn. They believed in making fun of the fat, the unintelligent, the poorly read, the conservative, and God. We believed in Ireland and scorned the Brits but loved England and adored the Beatles and hated the Monkees. I had no idea what was morally correct as a child, except you, should suffer for everyone and not show off. You should tell a good story, and when your parents drank, go to bed, and hold your breath and hope morning comes fast. You should swim in the ocean as frequently as possible, not expect praise for mediocre effort, and remain aware that mediocrity would be determined by two incredibly talented and impressive people who both graduated from Harvard. You were fucked. I went to first grade in Ireland when my father taught at UCD and learned that Tinkers will scream “Fuck” at you if you fail to give them any money. We had a wild-haired babysitter who beat us if we did anything she didn’t like, so my oldest sister made a deal with her not to tell my parents if the babysitter supplied her with chocolate bars. Halloween in the Irish countryside was darker than black velvet, and when you said “Trick or treat,” a trick was demanded, which made you long to go back to America where they knew how to hand out candy, and no one talked funny.
photo by Vivek Kumar
Scorning religion but mad pagans that we were, holidays were celebrated with style; presents and food prepared by a killer cook, my mom. Thanksgiving was a fresh-killed turkey, seasonal vegetables, chestnut stuffing, homemade bread, and pies. Catherine, my oldest sister was responsible for scoring, boiling, and extracting the balky chestnuts. I, youngest child, ironed cloth napkins and snapped green beans, Brigid, in the middle, was often caught staring into space instead of completing her assigned task. Christmas was once a goose, pronounced interesting but ultimately rejected. Presents left unwrapped because of some previous trauma my mom had with wrapping paper, my father haunted by memories of sad past Christmases invariably drunk and raging, the Christmas tree knocked over, hearts broken temporarily, anger and remorse in our stockings.
My family was also intolerant of fat people. My grandmother oversaw setting the standard, but the standard remained mysterious. You shouldn’t be fat or skinny or lazy or needy. My grandmother had been bombed in the Dardanelles, which I briefly interpreted to mean she had been drunk in France, but actually, she had literally been bombed and mustard gassed, or at least she had attended to those who had been mustard gassed when she was a nurse in WWI and went into the trenches with a French doctor converting dying young men to Catholicism with a French priest, she shanghaied with her eagle eye for spotting Catholics. Though heathens, we were christened, and my oldest sister went to catechism but quit after her holy communion, according to my mother, because she wore the veil to breakfast. My mother, who hadn’t taken her to church but allowed her to ride her bike there with a bible stuck in her belt, had told her, “No, you’re only a bride of Christ once, and then it’s over.” So, she quit. This ex-nurse Catholic grandmother told me I was the only one in our family not guilty of mortal sin since I was the youngest, which was odd because I can’t believe Brigid had done anything venal, although Catherine probably had, and my parents were definitely doomed. She told me to pray for the family, and maybe they wouldn’t go straight to hell.
For an entire year, I lined all my stuffed animals on my bed and in the unheated attic where our hair froze to the pillow, I prayed and prayed, not believing God had any interest in an eight-year-old’s desperate pleas for mercy, especially an eight-year-old who had watched dirty movies while on an Ocean Liner bound for Europe, movies with bare butts and breasts and actors speaking Italian. When my grandmother came to see us again, she demanded to witness my prayers, and when I showed her how I kneeled by my bed, she said it didn’t count because my bare knees needed to be on the cold floor instead of cushioned by my nightie. When she was in the convent in Ireland, they prayed on a frozen stone floor.
“This is New Jersey. We don’t believe in God.” I said.
So, I stopped praying.
One magical Christmas Eve in Paris, the year we lived in London, we borrowed a friend’s flat and went to midnight Mass at Notre Dame, and had a feast of oysters in a Paris Café. My mother told us the skinny woman gobbling oysters was a prostitute. This was the mystery of being an adult. You knew things. At eleven years- old I saw beauty in every fairy light, all of us together. A family friend, Bill Ward, the President of Amherst College and my father’s Harvard classmate, told me as he held my hand that I was excellent company.
Seventeen years later, my mother called to say he had committed suicide, wrists slashed at the Harvard Club.
“Remember Christmas Eve in Paris? He was wonderful to me. He seemed so happy.”
“Oh, those perfect oysters! Bill was very depressed. No one knew.”
Paris, the smell of roasting chestnuts and sugared almonds, such light and love that ended in despair, I think of the misery of adult men, my father, and boys I knew from college. That night in Paris, I felt special, safe, his hand warm in my own, our breath frosty in the cold air. He said he spoke French, and I told him how I had won a breaststroke race at my school in London.
“That’s a tough stroke,” he smiled down at me.
“Not as tough as the butterfly.”
“Oh, the butterfly is very tough.”
New Year’s Eve was for drinking, the day after for recovery, St. Patrick’s Day, corn beef and cabbage. One year my father met an Indian D.H. Lawrence scholar on the train to New York. Mr. Moti had read my father’s critical study of Lawrence, The Deed of Life. Invited to our St. Patrick’s Day party, Mr. Moti wore a button that said, “Kiss me, I’m Irish”, with a huge smile on his face. Easter was a feast of spring lamb and candy, jellybean hunts, and the celebration of Christ’s resurrection. “The Easter Bunny has risen,” Daddy would announce.
Spring in rural New Jersey, asparagus, and poison ivy. Our garden and lawn bursting with flowers, the meadows and woods beyond lush and full of rustling noises, newborn bunnies, fox cubs, and fawns, the air smelled of hope, honeysuckle, and my mother’s basil. On birthdays in May and June, Brigid and I were born three years apart, so we shared a party. Years later, at an adult celebration, I overhear her telling someone, “I hated sharing my birthday. I always cried.” Invitations were handed out in class because you invited everyone except the boys. My father offered Vesper rides; my mother baked cakes shaped like Irish cottages, lambs, or flowers. Catherine invented games, happiness, and presents. Daddy’s birthday was New Jersey strawberries, my mother’s shortcake, and fresh whipped cream. You understood how happy families felt. How joy tasted. You forgot about the bad times.
My role models were Honey West, the Bond girls, Jane Eyre, Helen Keller, Virginia Woolf, and television depictions of spunky career gals played by actresses like Marlo Thomas and Mary Tyler Moore, tortured co-dependent heroines like Anna Karenina or Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, or the women in various depressing foreign films who muttered about their sadness or rock star girls like Marianne Faithful or Janis Joplin, shooting heroin and singing the blues. And then there was my mother.
When I was little, really little, she wore a black bathing suit that soaked up the heat. After hours in the sun, I would fling myself on top of her and feel my mother as all comfort and warmth. Once, the girl who lived behind our house with her divorced mother told me my mother was dead, struck by lightning, and I ran home to see her sitting in the kitchen’s picture window, legs crossed, reading the paper. She smiled and waved, and I fell to my knees and promised god never to lie again if he’d not let her die. I dreamed she was lying in her coffin, and people made me look at her and say goodbye. I had watched my father menace her in a drunken rage, hit her, and draw blood, and I swore to kill him even though I loved him just as much. If only they knew how we cared. They were gorgeous and smart and funny and yet so angry. I wanted to turn on the lights and tell them to stop talking about the past. Read me a story. Turn off the lights. Stop talking about Ireland and dead writers. “Look at me!” I wanted to scream. “Listen to me.”
When our handyman shot himself, I was eight, and I intended to understand the adult world well enough to stay away. The summer had been endlessly hot and boring. My eldest sister’s scoliosis dominated as it had since the beginning of the year. In the downstairs living room converted to a sick room, Catherine had an air conditioner, a television set, and a French tutor named Madame Bop, who arrived each day at noon with her Pekingese under her arm, sometimes accompanied by her older sister, Madame Bop II who demanded I accompany her on long walks around the property. We would stroll down the rutted, graveled driveway to the barns behind our house and Bop II would tell fascinating things in rapid French, a language I did not understand. Abe had not yet put a bullet in his brain, and so I would bring the old French woman to where he sat in the shade drinking what I found out later was Kool-Aid generously laced with vodka.
“Howdy,” Abe bowed to Bop II, winking at me.
“Bonjour, Comment’allez vous?”
“Tres Bien.” His Jersey accent made it sound like “tray ben”
Catherine called my other sister, the middle one, Brigid, “La Peche” because she was so pretty and her face was covered with fine hair. Brigid wanted to be exactly like Catherine and didn’t want me except for my potential for enslavement. My father called us “The Three Graces”. I found a painting by Botticelli when we visited the Louvre and saw that the three Graces were slender, beautiful, and graceful. It was a surprise that my father thought we were beautiful. I had no reflection. None of the mirrors in our house reflected more than part of your face or an arm or, if you stood on the toilet, a thigh, or your neck if you stooped. When you attempted an outfit, you had to piece the parts together and hope for the best.
Brigid fell in the yard, crying that her back had given out. She was eleven, and I was eight. My parents were in New York taking care of Catherine after the surgery on her back. I cried at school because I’d overheard them discussing how there would be 20 pints of blood needed for her transfusion, and I was afraid she would die. Catherine had a long metal pincer meant to grab wayward books or to change a television channel in a remote less universe. Instead, she gathered the flesh of her wayward sisters, extracting promises, administering lectures, or reading her daily list of demands certain she had my attention, the tender skin of my upper arm imprisoned in steel fingers.
“Get my pillow, a Tab with ice and lemon, tell Mom I need shampoo, write down this word and look it up, go outside and stand on your head where I can see you.”
Catherine promised $100 for each time I ran upstairs to fetch her pillow. I kept a ledger full of check marks. It made me happy to do things for her. She was so funny, fearless, and like a grown-up but not. I believed everything she told me. I believed she knew more than anyone in the world except my parents. I knew she would never settle her debt. One day a violent summer thunderstorm struck after our daily dose of Dark Shadows, the greatest Vampire soap opera ever written. I was home alone with Catherine. The practical nurse had left, the sky grew darker and darker, intense rumbling started in the distance, the air was charged with electricity, and I saw that my sister, my brave, funny, and malicious sister was afraid of the coming storm.
“Where’s mom?” she craned her neck, difficult in a body cast, to catch my eye. Catherine was encased in plaster from the base of her spine to the top of her head. Her spinal column was curved like an S, so she had to have the vertebrae fused. When Catherine was first diagnosed, Brigid made me stand in my underpants, taking my mother’s seldom used lipstick, while she marked each knob of my spine to be sure it was straight and I was not destined to be a hunchback.
“She went to the job with the angry people.”
Our mother, an architect, had recently designed a new kitchen for some rich people who weren’t nice. Normally she would have told them to hire another architect, but Catherine’s spine had cost my parents lots of money.
“When will she be home?”
I shrugged.
“Maybe call Daddy.” Catherine wheeled her stretcher over to the window. The sky was as dark as night with clouds swirling like burnt meringue. “In case the house gets struck by lightning.”
As a child, a fireball chased our father while he was alone in an empty house. The ball of lightning had come down the chimney and followed him from room to room, attracted by his skin or something. I wondered why a six-year-old boy would be left alone in an empty house. My mother told me he had been left alone because his mother had to work, and his father was off getting drunk. Over and over again, I imagined how scary it must have been to try and outrun that ball of fire.
I had never seen Catherine afraid. It freaked me out, but it also made me happy because I could show that I was responsible and brave.
“Daddy teaches until five.”
Our father, an English professor was teaching a graduate seminar on Dickens.
“There’s going to be a thunderstorm. What if the house catches on fire?”
“Don’t worry. Abe finished the ramp. If the house gets struck by lightning, I can get you out.”
My sister was on a stretcher. There was no way I could make it down the ramp.
“Meanwhile, watch this!”
It had started to rain hard with small hailstones clattering against the roof. I dropped my shorts, and shirt and ran outside in my underpants. Appearing directly in front of the kitchen’s picture window, I imitated Vanessa Redgrave, portraying Isadora Duncan. I ran and leaped and pirouetted, sank to my knees, made dramatic arm movements worshipping the elements, and went from tree to tree, kissing the bark and grinding my pelvis into the stump my father had recently created from a maple he cut down. I did cartwheels and handstands and attempted a back flip, which temporarily knocked the breath from my body. But then I recovered, raised my leg in the air dramatically, did a bridge pose and managed to stand, bowed to my audience, and smiled.
I saw her face in the window laughing, I had made my brilliant sister laugh. It was a great day. Then my mother appeared in the same frame, looking at me as if she could not believe the savage she had birthed. Brigid was trying to get her attention, but our mother was bent over Catherine. I performed a final cartwheel and then headed back inside, drenched to the bone.
“Mouse,” Catherine said. “You’re amazing.”
“I could have done that,” Brigid sounded annoyed. “I’m more flexible.”
“No. Molly’s the wild child. You’re the pretty one.”
“You’re all beautiful,” my mother said, heading into the kitchen to start dinner. “My beautiful girls.”
We ignored her. Telling us, we were beautiful was what our mother did in lieu of paying attention to what was important. If we were beautiful, nothing else mattered. Beauty mattered. Beauty and brains, and don’t get fat. Never mind that you never explained her period to your youngest daughter and forget other secrets. You were busy and a feminist, and your legs in black stockings could rival those of any movie star. When your daughters cried, you tell them to stop. Crying is something you can’t control. Crying is not about you. Fear and sadness were selfish emotions lacking interest. Your own mother told you never to feel sorry for yourself. Sometimes I wonder whom you should feel sorry for; black people, Native Americans, the poor, anyone not as smart as us, the IRA?
When I was three, and we lived in London, I took ballet classes, and my parents and their friends called me “the dirty ole fairy,” except for this one man called filthy Farrell because he swore so much who called me “the dirty ole fucking fairy”. I was chubby and smiled all the time except when I had a temper tantrum and had to be tossed into a dark room and left to scream. “After that,” my mother said, “you were just perfect.” When I was four and Brigid seven, my parents took Catherine to New Mexico for a month, leaving us with separate grandmothers. My mother’s mother kept an icy washcloth to throw into my face when I cried. Two-hour naps alone in the afternoon, I missed my parents so much I believed they were gone forever. My tears rolled down into my ears, but I didn’t sob because crying was a sign you didn’t believe in god. We were raised on a diet of pain and happiness, with no sugar except on Easter because Christ died for our sins. Love and rage, guilt and absolution.
I decided to be the writer in the family and wrote poems in my terrible handwriting on lined paper, cover illustrated with a Daisy, the only flower I could draw, and balloon letters that spell out the title: The Collected Works of Molly Mary Ellen Moynahan. I wrote a poem about when our cat was hit by the school bus. “I had a cat named Red, red, red. The school bus ran him over now he’s dead, dead, dead. Red, red, red was fat, fat, fat. The school bus ran him over now he’s flat, flat, flat.” After I read hundreds of fairy tales, I started a novel about ill-fated lovers. I called my parents into the dining room to read the opening lines. “They were like two ships passing in the night. Her hair was ebony black, her eyes like sapphires while her cheeks blushed like red roses.” There was a brief silence, and then my mother and father laughed.
“Isn’t that awful?” my mother said.
“You’ve discovered clichés,” my father said.
I had found my identity. When I broke my arm falling on the frozen ground from the bathroom roof, I wrote a poem when the cast was finally removed. “I say goodbye to you, my friend, you white villain of plaster. I say goodbye to you, my friend, this is from your master.” I composed poems to mark anniversaries and birthdays. Undaunted by my family’s lack of interest in my work, I read aloud to our various cleaning ladies and surviving cats.
I don’t remember exactly when Abe shot himself. He had finished the ramp. My father had returned from teaching in Laramie, Wyoming, where he had accepted a summer school job for extra money. Brigid was still pretending to be in Macbeth, wandering around the house saying, “Out, out damn spot.” She wanted to be an actress, so we wheeled each other around on a hand truck, making Academy Award speeches, thanking all the little people, and kissing our hands to our fans. Actually, I was the sidekick, the assistant, and the lackey who would step aside, so the beautiful actress received all the attention. But she didn’t receive much of anything. If you were average in our family, your five minutes of fame was more like three seconds. Catherine was extraordinary, and I was in constant danger. Brigid was merely needy. She tried to boss me around the same way Catherine bossed her, but I didn’t care to be controlled. Catherine walked home from school, resting her books on Brigid’s head. I simply crossed the street when Brigid attempted to replicate this sisterly moment. Catherine didn’t push me around because I was little, and when Brigid tried, I resisted. I didn’t mind being alone.
I don’t know how I found out that Abe had committed suicide. If I think about it I can see my mother on the wall-mounted, black kitchen phone, the sharp intake of breath, like the way she reacted when they called to tell her my grandmother’s car had flipped on her way to visit us, driving alone from Florida, that sharp intake of breath that tells the listener that something very bad has happened. That night, the dead grandmother night, my mother gave us the dinner we had when there was nothing else to do but have dinner, hamburgernoodlesgreenpeas. I commented about “poor daddy,” and Catherine, who would soon spend a year encased in plaster, hit me.
“Shut up,” she said.
“Your father’s an orphan now,” my mother said, covering daddy’s dinner with a pot lid. “He has no parents.”
This seemed both tragic and sort of silly. Grown people weren’t orphans. Jane Eyre was an orphan, the Little Princess, and Oliver Twist, but my father was forty and had a house and a wife and me.
“Honey,” my mother called through the screen door as my father walked from his car, “your mother’s dead.”
This is what I remember. He was alone in the driveway holding his books and papers, and he sort of flinched and winced. We couldn’t hug him and kiss him and tell him that, yes, his mother had flipped her convertible on her way to see us, but she had died happy and independent and driving, which she had always enjoyed. Later that week, when a postcard arrived from her with a picture of something, a giant spoon or a teapot, some freaky American thing, and a note in her spidery writing, I ran up the stairs to my father’s study where he sat hunched over James Joyce or Yeats or maybe his next novel, breathing the way he breathed when he was thinking hard and I said, “Daddy, she isn’t dead. See, she isn’t dead.”
He took the postcard, read the note, and sighed. “No, Molser, she’s dead.”
My dad called me Molser, the Bison, and sometimes Swipsie.
He put his book down and told me a story about how Grandma was once knocked over by a car in Cambridge, and she had sat up as she was being loaded into an ambulance and said, “The pedestrian has the right of way.”
“Why did your father leave?”
My dad looked out the window. It was hunting season, and deep in the woods, you could hear gunfire.
“It was his way. He didn’t like to stay for long. He was a great dancer.”
My father’s father was a complete mystery, like his sister, who didn’t speak to us. I knew he drank and supposedly died in an alleyway, a gutter, or a doorway. Sometimes I lay awake thinking about my lost, restless grandfather. Other kids had normal grandparents, but we had Grandmother Reilly, I was named after her, who told us we were sinners. Grandfather Reilly was bald and deadly dull. Grandmother Moynahan was dead now, and the mysterious Joseph Moynahan vanished without a trace, with no pictures and few memories. What sort of dancing, I wondered. My mother adored Gene Kelly.
Usually, I didn’t get to sit in his study like this. The “back house” was behind our house. My mother called it the “ivory tower”. When the farm had been a real farm, this is where the migrant workers had lived during apple picking season, dozens of families crammed into a small house. There had been another building back there, a pump house full of ancient machinery we had removed. I remember coming home from school to discover a massive mud pile in the backyard, putting on my Wellington boots, and climbing into the mud. After a minute, I started to sink like someone in one of those Tarzan movies with snakes and quicksand and angry natives. I sank up to my waist until my father appeared and dragged me free. I lost a Wellington with a gigantic suck, and I imagined that boot somewhere near the center of the earth discovered by another civilization, its rubber indestructible, and my foot the last thing it contained.
“She almost died.” My Macbeth reciting sister Brigid announced over dinner.
“Not at all.” My mother murmured. “Not at all.”
I had already almost died a number of times. When we visited our glamorous Welsh friends in Mumbles, where Dylan Thomas had once lived, we swam in a tidal river that evidently had a killer current. Apparently, my sisters, one six, the other nine, were meant to serve as lifeguards. I was three, and my mother described me as “bouncy,” which might have meant floaty. I had also been lost on Fire Island for twelve hours, and my father convinced drowned. Waking up to a house full of hung-over adults and my sleeping cousins and sisters, I decided to go for a walk on the beach. As the evening approached, I found myself sitting on the counter of a man who had walked up to me and said, “Is your name Molly Moynahan?” He had called the police, who called my hysterical parents. He gave me Pecan Sandies and forbidden orange soda.
My childhood was marked by catastrophes. I had a nearly ruptured appendix, fell off the previously mentioned bathroom roof, badly breaking my arm, and poured molten lemon pudding over my leg, requiring the seared flesh to be removed. However, I was unbelievably healthy, and despite the number of rusty nails, I stepped on while barefoot I had never contracted lockjaw or rabies or tetanus, or food poisoning. I had perfect attendance for so many years my mother said it was unnatural and kept me home from school just to end that monopoly. I never had colds or earaches, or the flu. I had scarlet fever.
My mother caught Diphtheria when she was a teenager and was given penicillin, to which she was allergic. Given the last rites by a priest, my grandmother grabbed; according to legend, she eyeballed my distraught grandmother and said, “If I don’t die, I want a tweed suit.” All illnesses would be eclipsed by Catherine’s need to have her spine fused, and the year she spent encased in plaster emerging a good two inches taller than my father, speaking fluent French. Our handyman spent an entire summer building that ramp, and he wasn’t “our” handyman by any stretch of the imagination. We were Irish American and liberal and sent our cleaning lady to Washington to hear Martin tell the country about his dream. I read Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children a week before King was assassinated and felt the timing of his murder was a cruel attack on my awakening to the abomination of racism. I lectured Abe and Madame Bop’s sister on what I believed to be the scourge of our time outside of the Vietnam War and air pollution.
The boy who lived across the street who barely spoke used the n-word in my presence, and I threw him out of the house, announcing this deed to my mother, who was at that moment drinking coffee with Charlie Davis, a black family friend who was a provost at Yale. Charlie was light-skinned enough to make me think he was white, or I would have kept this a secret. “Right on, Molly,” Charlie said, winking at my mom. Abe was drunk, and Madame Bop’s sister didn’t speak much English, but they saw my passion and were kind enough not to make fun of me. The loneliness of an eight-year-old is an awesome thing when that eight-year-olds parents were preoccupied with their eldest child’s spinal fusion and their own hopes and ambitions.
I had no one to talk to. We lived in the country, and my sisters were not my friends; they were my sisters and might occasionally let me watch The Outer Limits with them, but that had to suffice. Brigid wanted to be just like Catherine, and I didn’t want to be anyone real, maybe Beth in Little Women except she died or Eloise living in the Plaza Hotel. When Catherine turned her attention my way, her eyes full of wicked intelligence, I would do anything she asked, a willing sidekick, an acolyte, and a follower.
“What’s your name, little boy?”
We were returning after a year in Ireland. I was six and had just won first prize in the costume contest on the Sylvania, an ocean liner we took from Southampton to New York. Catherine had dressed me as Lawrence of Arabia, the Peter O’Toole version. My costume involved sheets and towels twisted into an impressive King of the Desert outfit. Best of all, they thought I was a boy.
“And who designed your costume?”
“My sister.”
“You are a desert sheik?”
“I’m Lawrence of Arabia!” I had to shout since my face was swathed in towels.
“Mouse, strut!”
I strutted around the ballroom while people applauded. I was six, but I felt like a man on horseback, a warrior of the desert. Catherine schooled us on all things cool. The Rolling Stones were cooler than The Beatles, but we remained loyal. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, R. Crumb comics, anything subversive was cool. John Lennon’s book, A Spaniard in the Works, was in our bathroom.
We spent another year living abroad, London again, and my father earned a sabbatical year from Rutgers. St. John’s Wood was a wealthy, leafy London suburb, home to Paul McCarthy, the Apple Studios, and, briefly, my family. In 1968 my family spent a year living in London while my father wrote another novel on sabbatical from Rutgers College. I went to fifth grade at Barrow Hill Comprehensive, where I went up against the school bully who managed to control a class of fifth graders, largely through verbal cruelty but often with physical violence. She was a pretty, well-dressed girl with perfect knee socks, while I was a wild-haired American whose school uniform was invariably wrinkled, my socks rarely matching, my shoes scuffed. Because I refused to bend to her authority, I spent most of the year in Coventry and was also punched in the mouth by a diminutive hit man who ran up to me outside of my favorite sweet shop and, in a Cockney accent, said, “Is your name Molly Moynahan?” When I nodded, he jumped up and punched me in the mouth, splitting my lip open.
Each day after lunch, I walked into the schoolyard and faced a brick wall, located my favorite brick, and spent the half hour ignoring being ignored except for the bully’s hench-people, who sometimes muttered threats. After months of this, my teacher, Mrs. Sadler, invited my mother in to discuss the situation. I had revealed nothing to my parents, leaving the house on the weekends to ride a bus or walk around by myself. My sisters were busy being enchanted by swinging London, hemming their skirts until their bums were visible, and wearing make-up bought at BIBA, the coolest store in London It was a store where anyone older than thirty was ancient, and all its eye makeup was dark purple and made you look like Twiggy. There was the library and also the Piccadilly Circus bus, which I kept boarding until the bus driver leaned back and explained there was no circus, just a traffic circle called a circus in England. “I know you, Yanks expect something with elephants and clowns. But it’s nothing but a turn-around, love. Nothing but a roundabout.”
Coming back to the United States after that year in London marked our status as outsiders in the school system. Catherine went to Princeton Day School for her senior year, but Brigid and I were back in the “real” New Jersey with crosses being burned in Hightstown and my English accent considered snobbish and fake. My parents went to Europe and left Brigid, 15, and me, 12, in Catherine’s care for months. She welcomed her friends, freshmen from Harvard, Radcliffe, and Princeton, who harvested almost a ton of dope that she had grown behind our house. Helping me with my homework, Catherine wrote out the lyrics to Willie the Pimp by Frank Zappa for a poetry assignment. The opening lines, “I’m a little pimp with my hair gassed back, Pair khaki pants with my shoe shined black. Got a little lady…walk the street Tellin’ all the boys that she can’t be beat.” For this, I was sent to the principal, who looked like he was squelching laughter as he labeled my poem inappropriate. On my birthday, she baked a cake and covered the frosting with food coloring, with a marijuana leaf dead center. I wanted to be a cheerleader, but I worshipped Catherine just as I feared for her, sensing her reckless nature. During that long, strange summer, we had a wild assortment of Ivy league radicals living in our house, charging liquor at the store where my parents had an account, and taking a lot of drugs. One of her friends was implicated in throwing a Molotov cocktail at the Institute for Defense Analyses housed on the Princeton campus, rumored to be a think tank for those supporting the war in Vietnam. Earlier in the day, three of Catherine’s friends had borrowed a corkscrew for a picnic. By then, my parents had returned and banished the remaining houseguests.
“Say nothing,” my father said.
The FBI and Nixon had a long enemies list. It was a distinction to discover your name.
There was a sense that the world was in terrible shape, college students shot at Kent State, young men dying in Vietnam, Vietnamese civilians slaughtered by those same young men, the National Guard shooting with live ammunition, policemen cracking open the skulls of protesters with their truncheons, protesters looting and burning down cities, Bobby Kennedy’s eyes going dim as he died on the floor of a hotel kitchen while Martin Luther King was gunned down in Memphis. I felt I was growing up in a world ruined by war, hatred, racism, and guns. On television. we watched American boys in uniform dying in the war. Walter Cronkite announced someone had killed untold civilians in a place called My Lai. When Richard Nixon was elected President, my mother spoke of wishing him dead with such hatred I was shocked.
The cities were burning, Charlie Manson cut a baby out of Sharon Tate’s womb, and my sister was going to college, a place where policemen in riot gear beat the heads of students. I got my period, and no one remembered to explain what that meant. In school, they separated the girls from the boys and showed us a movie featuring Bambi-like deer and a diagram of a woman’s reproductive system. I didn’t understand what it meant. I had read the directions in the Tampax box, had read about sex, watched it in the movies, listened to the boy next door explain that the man peed into the woman’s butt and a flower grew, I had even watched the au pair hired by the Gales in England have sex with her boyfriend, peering through the skylight on the roof. Nevertheless, I didn’t have a clue about anything concrete.
It was puzzling to visit friends whose parents appeared to understand what was needed regarding school supplies, and lunches, who were willing to drive places and pick you up after school activities. I was used to standing alone at dark bus stops or walking or hitchhiking, and while I might tell my parents something about school or my life, they never asked and seldom listened. After dinner, when the drinking droned on, I lay on my back in the fields, the midnight blue sky pieced by a million silver stars. The grass and tall weeds rustled with the night wanderings of moles, rabbits, foxes, and deer. I longed for happiness, but my family seemed constantly on the verge of ruin. My father’s dark side was the darkest thing I had ever seen, and I wondered how we would survive. I tried to believe in God, but I didn’t. Love was easier yet so fragile. The local paper’s headline, Blaze Wakens Girl! I came out of a dream in my attic bedroom, made of daylight by flames. The big barn, our clubhouse, was on fire. I ran downstairs where my father, drunk, was listening to The Travelling People sing about defeating and banishing the British.
“Daddy,” I screamed. “The barn’s burning down!”
“Go to bed,” he slurred.
The party had ended at three. Daddy could never stop. The living room was as light as the morning; the inferno reflected on the white walls and the picture windows. When the fire department arrived, we had no water source, our well was not a hydrant, and the firemen had to run down the road to hook up their hose. In the cold, distant neighbors stood watching while my father hosed down our fruit trees.
Abe shot himself in the head. I came down for breakfast, and my mother was making breakfast. This was a sign of impending tragedy. Blueberry pancakes had marked each dead cat. Pancakes, plus my mother, were a sign of death. Warily, I ate a pancake doused in real maple syrup heated with butter.
“Abe climbed a tree on his property and shot himself.”
“Why?”
“He was unhappy,” my mother said, turning to face me. “He had a terrible wife.”
“He was my friend. He told me I was going to be pretty.” I was crying through a mouthful of food.
“He wasn’t your friend, honey. He was drunk and sad. Grown men can’t be friends with little girls.”
Abe and I had discussed things like race and politics and boys. He had called me the “Queen of the Girl Scouts”, which was a joke since Brigid had been kicked out of Girl Scouts for something, swearing or protesting the war. I was banned from Brownies, but Abe said it didn’t matter. I told Abe about my book, and he said he wanted an autographed copy. He also told me I was very smart and would be on a television talk show like Phil Donahue.
“And you’re not just smart. You’re gonna be a knock-out.”
This was a real worry for me. My sisters were clearly brilliant and beautiful and difficult. They didn’t seem to attract the sort of boys that would show up at your door and meet your father. Of course, it was the late sixties, and no one did that sort of thing anymore. I would start high school and sleep with boys and not date and the boys who liked me and wanted to date me, I would reject because my heart was a stone, and I was no longer someone who once, like Anne Frank, believed the world was basically good. I was sad and lost and dark, as dark as my father but too young, so it was dangerous and stupid. And I had this ridiculous hopefulness, the same hopefulness that caused me to think maybe Abe was happier dead if his wife was so mean and that maybe my sister would end up with the perfect life she deserved after the thing with her back and other stuff that happened when she went to college. She deserved a long, happy life, but that was not to be. I consumed all the messages girls my age were given, be sexy, don’t be a ball buster, men don’t like strong women, be an earth mother, wear a power suit, be careful, fuck everyone, don’t fuck anyone, all men are dogs, men are magic, you will always be alone, be careful, or you’ll always be alone.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach