Getting Lost: My Secret Superpower

Chapter Two-Memoir (revised)

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. 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 hungover 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?” I answered in the affirmative so he 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 ice covered 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.

One New Years Eve my parents left the house looking beautiful, mom with her chestnut hair swept into a French twist, a glamorous dress, her long legs encased in black stockings, daddy in a suit. They gleamed and I ached with love for them. My two sisters were in charge, I was probably seven or so, Catherine was thirteen and very bossy. We watched a movie called Come Back, Little Sheba and everything I most feared in the world, my father’s drinking, loss, the sadness of grown-ups was suddenly revealed. 

I don’t know how this was resolved. Possibly my sisters changed the channel, and we watched something else, but I remember when my mother found out what had happened, she said something like, “How mean to play that movie on New Years Eve when children are at home and parents are at parties.” There was no discussion of why I had such a violent reaction, nor was there any awareness, at least from my current perspective, that I was carrying the great weight of our family’s terrible secret, my father’s drinking, his sadness, and my parents’ violent marriage. 

At that stage of my life, I had witnessed my father hurting my mother on numerous occasions, always drunk, probably in a blackout, a monster man who stole away the best daddy in the world. Come Back, Little Sheba is a movie about alcoholism, a middle-aged couple’s fading marriage and the dog, Sheba, that represented their lost baby. Handsome Burt Lancaster plays the main character with a single year of sobriety under his belt, 1950s Alcoholics Anonymous portrayed with sincere-looking people drinking coffee. What the film made clear to me was that my father was sad and if I tried very hard, I could possibly save him from dying. William Inge’s screenplay depicted a married couple, the husband a shaky, recovering alcoholic, the wife an insecure, sad woman whose one joy was her dog, the runaway Sheba in the title. Sitting with my sisters I recognized the husband’s longing to disappear which, like my father, meant he was in danger, like my father, and like my father it seemed that he would never be happy. I became hysterical, overwhelmed by the idea that my father would die, the loneliness of alcoholism and the vision of life as a dark dream. The film underscored the limits and the lies of love.

I adored him. I feared him. I wondered why my mother seemed to encourage him to drink despite the usual disasters that ensued. Once I had screamed that I hated him after I had found my mother in bed with a broken nose, a trail of blood down the hallway. I told him I would kill him. I was six. He left, still drunk, and I believed he would crash into something and die. 

Scott Russell Sanders describes what it feels like to have a father who is an alcoholic in his brilliant essay, Under the Influence: Paying the price of my father’s booze, the idea that somehow you can change the truth, save your family, and erase the things that haunt you as you try to fall asleep.

“I still panic in the face of other people's anger because his drunken temper was so terrible. I shrink from causing sadness or disappointment even to strangers, as though I were still concealing the family shame. I still notice every twitch of emotion in those faces around me, having learned as a child to read the weather in faces, and I blame myself for their least pang of unhappiness or anger. In certain moods I blame myself for everything. Guilt burns like acid in my veins.”

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. During that endless, hot summer when my father had left to teach in Wyoming leaving my mother to renovate the house and take care of us, my sister Brigid used to tell me to take my clothes off and bend over so she could mark the knobs of my spine with lipstick. 

One afternoon I watched my mother as she washed her feet in the bathroom sink and the weight off her foot made the sink fall off the wall. She sat down on the edge of the tub and cried. The farmhouse was derelict when we moved in. Despite my mother’s efforts, which were heroic, there was an endless list of needed repairs. When my father was a professor at Amherst, mom made friends with another faculty wife who taught her an amazing number of things including bread baking, carpentry, painting, and sewing. She made a set of blocks and most of our clothes. With the degree she had obtained at Harvard Design School, one of only three women to graduate, her role as a faculty wife there, at Princeton University and later at Rutgers, she transformed the farmhouse while my father managed to put out the garbage and mow the lawn.

After Catherine recovered I looked for paintings as we travelled through Europe that featured children leaning on crutches or sticks since my mother had told me that without the surgery, Catherine would have been a hunchback. In college I took an art history class and noticed how many paintings showed a figure leaning on a crutch or a stick. 

“Disability has been depicted in art throughout history, often reflecting the prevailing attitudes and beliefs of the time period and culture. In ancient art, disability was sometimes portrayed as a punishment from the gods or a sign of moral failing. The blind seer Tiresias in Greek mythology was depicted as a figure punished by the gods. Hunchback court jesters were common characters in medieval European art, often used for comedic effect or to symbolize foolishness.”

I thought about my sister and that endless year when she was encased in that shell, my parents circling her like satellites while she slowly recovered. Being eight, I tried to lessen the parenting burden on them. There were times I went to school barefoot and other times bad things happened to me, but since I was not, unlike my sister, confined to a stretcher, I kept those secrets.

She lay there in the body cast, her hair cut short, on her tummy for a year. When the doctor told my father that the drunk driver had hit her in the back, he winced as if he’d been punched. “The fusion,” he said. I thought how terrible it must be to cherish a child, do everything to make sure they are healthy and then, in an instant, all of those efforts, all of the hope and dreams for that child’s future could be destroyed. 

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-old’s parents were preoccupied with their eldest child’s spinal fusion and their own hopes and ambitions. I had no one to talk to. 

photo by Mike Arney

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 McCartny, 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. 

My sisters were busy being enchanted by swinging London, hemming their skirts until their bums were visible, and wearing makeup 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, fifteen, and me twelve, in Catherine’s care for months. She welcomed her friends, students 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 that 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 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 wanted to disappear but also to be assured that those I left would not miss me.

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 read: Blaze Wakens Girl! I came out of a dream in my attic bedroom, made bright as daylight by flames. The big barn behind our house, our massive jungle gym, was on fire. I ran downstairs where my father, drunk, was listening to The Dubliners singing 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 downstairs 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 and heated 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.”

I didn’t know his Thermos was filled with Vodka. 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.

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