More of the Beginning
An excerpt from The Bolter: A Memoir
photo by Sabina Sturzu
I think the library saved my life. I sat on the floor looking at books about nudist colonies filled with black-and-white pictures of naked people in sneakers, playing volleyball, practicing archery, grilling hamburgers, and generally being naked, which I found bizarre but also helpful since there were no boys in our family and my father was not a naked person ever. Also, I read all of Jane Austen, Dickens, the Brontes, Louisa May Alcott, piles and piles of books. I read magazines about teenage life, girls who gave cute parties with refreshments that looked like doll food; crustless sandwiches, heart-shaped cookies, and sherbet punch. These girls had long, shiny brushed hair, small oval faces, and huge eyes. They stood gracefully, knees jutted out at attractive angles, they seemed like space creatures, but they were just models. I had tried make-up. When we lived in London in 1967-68, I had turned eleven, and Mary Quant introduced false eyelashes, pearly pink lip- gloss, and POP into the fashion world. But then we returned to New Jersey, and no one wore the Liberty print dresses my mother sewed from Vogue patterns with enormous sleeves, short and trendy and original, while girls at Lawrence High were still in polyester skirts to their knees. Catherine was kicked out of school because her skirt was too short.
“Her math teacher was staring at her legs,” my mother reported over dinner. “If she were fat, no one would have said anything.”
The year I was born, 1957, women stayed home to keep house or went to work until they met the man they would marry, and then they stayed home and kept house or put on nail polish and curled their hair and wore fancy dresses to make dinner. Unhappy, gifted, smart women like Ann Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Shirley Jackson drank martinis or took drugs or killed themselves, unable to face the fact their lives had so little substance. Communists were lurking, and girls still wore stockings. A nice girl didn’t kiss on the first date; boys paid and opened doors, and stood when a woman entered the room. Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Ava Gardner, Dorothy Dandridge, Bridgette Bardot, Sophia Loren, Doris Day, Kim Novak, and Lana Turner were the hot women on screen, bosomy goddesses who embodied femininity alien to my mother or, in the case of Doris Day, a femininity bushwacked by cuteness. Ten years later, everything had changed. The new list included Diana Rigg, a smart, cat-suited femme fatale who always knew what to do in The Avengers, and Jane Fonda, whose politics and penchant for marrying powerful men and taking on their personalities and beliefs identified her as a perfect representative of the strange era of feminism crossed with intense sexism that marked my coming of age. You must be willing to have sex with a stranger but be careful not to be labeled a whore.
I was deeply confused. By the time I turned fifteen, I knew an enormous amount about sex but knew nothing about boys or men. Growing up with two sisters and a father who made a single statement, “Boys are a bad lot,” I was a grenade with the pin pulled, totally romantic, naïve, and completely clueless. We were three girls, and my father was a mystery as far as any of that went. I had read vivid descriptions of sex written by D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Nabokov, and Anais Nin, but somehow there was a dearth of reality and a plethora of flowers, picnics, and swooning. I imagined the world spinning out of control but then what? Brigid was beautiful. Men stopped us in the street to ask her out, and I was expected to act like the mentally challenged younger sister to discourage them. I looked like a gypsy, something seen in the back of a tinker’s caravan or an ad for kids who needed charity to take a bath. The drugstore magazines portrayed an ideal woman as skinny with big boobs or really skinny with no boobs, impossibly long legs, hollowed out cheeks, and huge, vacant eyes. Barbie, another item on my mother’s forbidden list, was a wasp-waisted, slim-hipped, huge bosomed, always tanned girl with feet permanently shaped for stilettos. My mother was beautiful, but she didn’t fit the image; she was neither sexy nor a housewife; my mother seemed larger than life, glamorous, powerful, strong, and smart but somehow vulnerable. She could do anything, bake, sew, cook, garden, put up walls and knock them down again, design houses, her hands scarred yet still soft. When she twisted her thick chestnut hair up into a bun and put on lipstick and black stockings, I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Other mothers seemed merely human next to her, weak women who drove their kids around in a station wagon and just cared if they were happy. My mother had danced with James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison.
Men walked on the moon, and my parents put Brigid and me in a Christian Science camp without knowing it was Christian Science and left for Europe. Brigid was bullied for not owning a bra, and I told the fat counselor my family didn’t believe in God when she asked me whether I wanted to say my prayer aloud or to myself. “We don’t believe in god,” I told her, sitting up in my bunk bed. I heard my cabin mates gasp. “There is no god,” I added helpfully.
“Oh! You, poor little girl.” The counselor said.
From then on, my identity at Camp Betsey Cox was the Poor Little Girl who doesn’t believe in God.
I wanted a love like the love The Phantom felt for Diana Palmer, or the love Illya Kuriakan, the gloomy Russian spy in The Man From U.N.C.L.E had for his female co-star who was invariably shot and died swearing eternal love, or the love James Bond felt for his bikini-clad spy women who were thinking about ending their slutty spy ways but were killed before they could reform or for the love Rima felt for the jungle in Green Mansions or any number of other fictional characters like Nancy in Oliver Twist who is murdered trying to help Oliver or Beth in Little Women who died a virgin and the nicest sister because the nicest sister always died. I was a morbid, literary oddball who read the obituaries aloud to our cleaning lady, trying to involve her in the tragic demise of strangers, but when that failed, I read aloud the morbid poem, The Highwayman, with its depiction of Bess, the landlord’s black-eyed daughter, trussed up with a gun pointing at her breast waiting for her highwayman lover to come riding across the bridge. Everyone died in my stories, but first, they had great sex. If my parents had been paying attention, they might have packed me off to therapy with someone who could sever this embrace of sex and death, but they were too glamorous and busy, and they went to Rome without a contact number, leaving us with the crazy Christian Scientists and their hope to save me from my heathen childhood.
Seventh grade was heaven. The worst year of my life had finally ended. I had lost my stomach-curdling crush on Jeff Kramer, finally stopped wanting his chosen ice-skating partner, Cindy Polaro, to get hit by a bus, and finally stopped waking up afraid my father had left forever, and Catherine was going to get hurt protesting the war. I was less of a child. I had played spin-the-bottle and kissed someone in a closet for 7 minutes in heaven, which was just stupid. I had survived the weird passion of the boy who lived across the street and used the n-word, who spent many afternoons sitting beside our mailbox, fatly, staring at our house. I had read Wuthering Heights, and Emma and David Copperfield and Catherine had read aloud from Naked Lunch, which made me cry. These were drug-fueled, violent visions of hell described by William Burroughs. “This is what Daddy teaches at Rutgers. Isn’t it great?”
In the fashion magazines Cosmo, Mademoiselle, and Glamour, I followed instructions for applying false eyelashes, turning my hair blonde with lemon juice, and sleeping in rag curlers, which made me look like Little Orphan Annie. I wanted to be exotic and grown-up like Julie Christie in Dr. Zhivago or the blonde model that Robert Redford fell in love with in Downhill Racer. The model wore a suede coat with fur that I coveted for years. Instead of fantasizing about love or a boy, I thought about me in that coat with long blonde hair and an Austrian accent standing at the top of a ski lift.
Cynthia Isaly was not exotic. She came from Marion, Ohio, and said things like ‘quit it’ and ‘god durn it’ and ‘fudge!’ She came to live in New Jersey when her father was transferred to run the Buxton’s Ice Cream chain; famous for its massive cones which I invariably dropped. I said things like ‘bullshit’, ‘godamn it, and ‘fuck!’ Cynthia never swore or lied or was mean. I should have hated her, but I loved her. I loved her so much that when she moved back to Ohio, I thought my heart would break, and when she was killed at twenty, the understanding I had lost her forever pushed me closer to the dark edge. I had been in love with her, body and soul, but I never told her, I was afraid to tell her, afraid she might not love me back even though I know she did. Briefly, she made me stop hating myself. She thought I was beautiful and smart and funny and good. She thought I was graceful and strong and artistic. The first time I met her, I judged her clumsy and uncool. She reminded me of a Golden Retriever, all paws and long legs and huge eyes, heavy-lidded and blue. She was silly and childish. She hooted when the teacher told stupid jokes and raised her hand to tell us all about Ohio and her family as if we cared. Her self-confidence was awe-inspiring. She loved her family and admitted that she loved America, and when we pledged allegiance to the flag, she almost yelled, smiling like it was the best thing ever. She carried a lunchbox as a purse.
“I don’t think I like her,” I told my mom as I set the table that night. “She’s sort of weird.”
Cynthia was open-hearted, fearless, and happy. She was happy, and I didn’t know how to accept someone who still trusted the world was safe and good, that loved her parents and sisters, and believed she would marry, have babies, and do something interesting. In my world, this was exotic. Uncomplicated people were an alien species, frequently republican, probably lacking the Harvard education most of my family sported. Her people didn’t get drunk, describe human existence as pointless, tell their daughters they were losers, and neglect their kids. Her family went to church; her bedroom was a girl’s room, all frilly and cozy, unlike my monk’s cell. Her father kissed and hugged her. Her mother made her lunch daily, a sandwich, cookies, an apple, and potato chips in small bags. On that first day of 7th grade, Cynthia asked me if I could spend the night on the weekend, a social behavior I found shocking because I equated rejection and meanness with desirability. However, I was desperate.
“Okay,” I said, writing her phone number on my wrist.
I pined for the sort of girlhood that supplied cute sleeping bags and fetching overnight cases. My sleeping bag was a survivor of Camp Betsy Cox, and my nightgown and toothbrush were in a brown paper A&P shopping bag. She didn’t care. Her bedroom was a shrine to femininity, to her love of David Cassidy (I cured her of that), and to hobbies like stringing beads and embroidering things on her jeans. She had paper flowers and fake psychedelic posters, and nearly no books. Her room was a paradise. It smelled like her, of patchouli and Love’s fresh lemon spray, and then like her skin, of vanilla and lavender soap. My bedroom was so cold, with ice forming on the windows in the winter in an unheated attic, sweltering during the summer in the humidity and heat, white walls, no curtains, a few glass animals, and a few saved shells. We talked all night about boys (I lied) and places we had lived (her: Ohio), me, (Ireland, England, Spain). She said her parents had voted for Nixon, and I told her my mother wanted to kill Nixon and the Pope. She had two older sisters like me and a younger one who came to the door a few times, and we were mean to her. It was fun to be mean to someone who couldn’t defend herself. On Saturday mornings, we watched hours of cartoons on a huge color TV while her mother made us snacks to eat in the living room; there were so many rules broken, daytime television, eating away from a table, and spending so much time being idle. The family room (we didn’t have one) had huge, overstuffed chairs called Lazy-Boys that my mother would have labeled fat people furniture.
Their house had air-conditioning and heat and few books to mock you for your lack of industry or neurotic insecurity, mock you for your inability to comprehend why Gudrun was so mean to Gerald in Women in Love, so cruel he wandered off to freeze to death or why Ursula was so needy, why Beth had to die or why most characters in great novels suffered, drank, fucked the wrong people, took miserable care of their children, walked alone into the ocean to drown because they were frustrated artists or their lovers dumped them or they were terrible mothers, or they just didn’t know how to behave in a way that was socially acceptable. I had been reading these books since I was beaten into literacy by my elderly first-grade teacher in Ireland, reading about famines, and brutal orphanages, and sad, lost men like Henchard in Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. I was doomed to love that kind of man over and over again, lost, unstable, unhappy, incapable of love, seductive, and treacherous. Men whose mothers had left them or mocked them or committed suicide, or were just plain mean and inarticulate about their unhappiness. But that night, tucked up into a Lazy-Boy, eating buttered popcorn and drinking forbidden soda, watching The Love Boat, I imagined myself happy, ordinary, and pretty. I wanted to live in a housing development, in a ranch house, on a cul-de-sac full of other children.
I went home the next day different. Now I had a best friend. I tried speaking to my family in a girlish, soft voice, a voice I imagined Amy in Little Women might have. In my new role as the sweetest, most spiritually developed member of my family, I walked outside after dinner to lie on my back and look at the stars. Since we had returned from London after my father’s sabbatical year had ended, I had held my shoulders tight, ignoring the fact that except for our suicidal handyman and a kind cleaning lady, I was alone. I tried to think about Cindy and all the fun we had, but then the story of The Bad Seed came back to me, a murder story about a child who has a genetic disposition for murdering those that she dislikes and inherited from her grandmother. Her own mother must kill her when she has a flashback to her childhood when her mother stabbed her brothers and sisters and then called to her holding a bloody knife. I looked back at our house, lights blazing, no murder there but the glint of glass that suggested my parents would continue to drink wine and maybe have a lovely time and end the evening peacefully or maybe not, maybe my father would move into the whiskey and start his transformation from my daddy to the darkly unhappy stranger who silently came through the front door and took him away, a stranger who would look at me coldly and describe the world as a place of misery and humiliation.
Seventh grade was supposed to be set in a brand-new school called The Intermediate School, but it wasn’t ready by the time we needed to leave the overcrowded temporary classrooms of 6th grade. Instead, we were sent to attend school in the National Guard Armory. I’m not sure where the National Guard was. After the Kent State shootings, it seemed like everyone was either an anti-war protester or a soldier. The National Guard kept getting photographed looking overwhelmed and miserable at the prospect of beating up more college students. In Palmer Square, a beloved English teacher, Mrs. Shepard, sat in silent vigil for her only child, who had died in Vietnam. We invaded the Armory; one hundred feral sixth graders were set free in a building meant to house soldiers. The walls on wheels meant to create classrooms failed to contain us as we climbed on the tanks, bought candy and cigarettes from the vending machines, and attempted to pick the locks into the storerooms that possibly contained weapons and made the plots of novels like Lord of the Flies and A High Wind in Jamaica seem likely. We were fearless and happy, and our teachers were a breed apart from the junior high school teachers; they were young and funny and did little to maintain order. Cindy and I were in love with each other, but our classmates, angry black kids waking up in a country that just made desegregation mandatory, to a country that was racist to its core, viewed us as ‘honky bitches’. We didn’t deserve their hatred, but they didn’t deserve being called names. One of my best friends from kindergarten, a girl who had attended all my birthday parties, threatened to kick my ass, and I was devastated.
After Christmas break, the soldiers returned, and they housed us on the top floor of the high school, where we continued our wild, lawless ways and were so scary the high school students were afraid of us. One day Kenny Stovekin, a boy who had supposedly impregnated a girl in our class that fall, decided he wasn’t going to take a detention the science teacher gave him, and he opened a window and threw a chair through it. This was a signal for all the windows to open, and more chairs, a desk, books and bags, and other stuff getting flung to the grass below. Finally, we were lectured by the local police to stop rioting. I was happy. Cindy and I spent nearly every weekend together at her house or my house, more often her house because she didn’t live in the Appalachia of New Jersey but rather in a development full of other kids. We both had crushes on John Pollen, who was painfully skinny, inarticulate, and rode a mini bike. He had a too big black leather jacket and greasy hair and didn’t embody anything we wanted in a boyfriend, but he was there, lurking, combing his icky hair, wearing stupid aviator glasses that made him look like a big bug, slouching on his mini-bike, silent and entitled. We were clueless virgins, silky-haired, long-limbed, giggling girls who thought love and sex would transform our lives neither of us felt the cold breath of death on our soft skin, sure we would live forever.
Cindy had a slumber party, and we put avocado masques on our faces, dressed her dog in doll’s clothes, teased her little sister until she cried, made crank calls to our crushes, and at the height of the hysteria, ran outside in our baby doll pajamas and received a major shock from the electric fence that bordered the neighbors’ property. After we all shrieked and giggled, we joined hands and ran down the hill repeatedly, loving how we felt when the shock entered our bodies through our bare feet, ratcheting up our spines and out the top of our heads. Something happened to our muscles, and we collapsed in a heap, screaming until Cindy’s mother came outside and suggested we do something less noisy. Mind you, back then, we also chased the DDT trucks begging to be sprayed, deliberately broke thermometers to play with the mercury, the boys next door lobbed firecrackers at us, and no one wore seat belts or helmets or any form of protective devices. People tanned on aluminum foil, coating their bodies with baby oil and iodine, they smoked and drank when they were pregnant, and few breastfed. Almost everyone except our freaky family consumed vast amounts of red meat, sugar, salt, and artificial ingredients. Sex held no danger except for pregnancy, for which you took the pill or VD, which was easily cured. Cocaine wasn’t addictive.
We had watched three assassinations; men walking on the moon, and an entire war on television. If we were going to die young, it would not be from drinking diet soda. It would be like Hiroshima, only shadows left on the wall to document your existence, the snap of a light turned off, the crack of lightning, a bullet fired from a crowd, the gloved hand closing around your throat. I was afraid all the time. I thought my father would kill my mother, the Boston Strangler would kill my grandmother, a policeman would kill my sister, a car would kill our dog, and a tornado would descend on New Jersey and, in a moment, cancel all my hopes and dreams for the future. I wanted to be a writer, an actress, a teacher, and a mother. I wanted everyone to be happy and well. I wanted world peace and no more hunger. I wanted an end to racism and domestic violence. I thought people should be nicer to one another and more aware of how fortunate they were to be alive and not slaughtered by Nazis. I wanted everyone I loved to be safe. I tried praying again, but I felt stupid and alone. I threw away my stuffed animals and started writing bad poetry about darkness and wolves and ice and wool blankets. I was fourteen, and things were about to get terrible. My oldest sister would try heroin, and I would be alone again. Although she was always mysterious, I knew she loved me no matter what. Catherine would leave for college, and I would stand in her empty bedroom, missing her very much.
Cindy’s father was transferred by his job back to Ohio, and she would have a single month before she would return to her former life and leave me. I came home from school and told my mother.
“She’s my best friend. I don’t want to be alone again.”
My mother was flattening a chicken with a mallet. “Stop it. Don’t feel so much. You’ll find someone else.”
“I won’t! She was my best friend.”
“Well, Frankie Brady was my best friend, and he died when I was seventeen.”
I had heard about Frankie Brady, who died of some mysterious disease, since I was six. At that moment, I just needed her to say she was sorry.
Cindy and I rented a canoe and sat in the middle of the Delaware Water Gap, crying, promising we would stay best friends, we would call and write and visit, and nothing would change how we felt about each other.
“You’re my Molly,” she said, tears spilling from her huge blue eyes, tears for me, for the loss of me. We paddled in circles crying and laughing, remembering the things we had done together, renting horses that tried to kill us, fighting over John Pollen, and then both realizing how small a thing our feelings were for him compared to how we felt about each other. I told her about how my father acted when drunk and my sister taking drugs. She had told me how her father didn’t think women should work and how he forbade her from saying bad things about the president. She had chosen me first, checked to make sure I was at school, ate lunch with me every day, remembered things I told her, and listened. With her, I was claimed, found, welcomed, and safe. I had been lost at the London Zoo for half a day; on Fire Island for an entire day and evening; in every large city and every large store where a small child could wander away, I wandered away. Cindy waited for me in front of the school, saved me a seat, lent me a pen, shared her lunch, and waited for me to catch up. She didn’t turn away when I was sad; she called me and shared her belief that our destiny was to be happy, famous, and of use. If I were lost, she would find me. If I fell behind, she’d wait.
The last summer I spent with Cynthia, we had devised a way to go on a six-week bicycling trip together sponsored by the American Hostel Association; I lied and said her parents said yes; she lied and said my parents said yes, but no one said yes but it didn’t matter. What could be more wholesome than riding 60-70 miles a day with eight other fifteen –year olds chaperoned by a reliable adult? But it was 1972, our fearless leader was an ex-Hell’s Angel who fell off his bike two days into the trip, breaking his collarbone, and he was finally sent back to New York City to be replaced by Mr. Handsome with whom I fell madly, hopelessly in love. That summer, I had my braces removed, the baby fat had disappeared, the sun turned my skin brown, and my hair streaked with blonde. Standing in a department store in Maine, Cynthia and I had become Amazons with muscular legs and bike locks around our waists. We were being stared at, catcalled, and asked out by men of all ages. We bicycled, partied, and I pined across three New England states, eight adolescents, and a boy-man who, when I took my shirt off in his tent and suggested he marry me, kicked me to the curb, never mind that the assignation was his idea. Cynthia found me sitting by the dying embers of our campfire.
“What happened?"
“He doesn’t want me.”
He’s stupid. Come sleep.”
We lay together in our tent, head-to-head, Cynthia told me about a boy she liked in a marching band who played the trumpet. She turned over and kissed me on the cheek.
“Someday, someone will love you as much as I do.”
We fell asleep laughing at the mystery of men.
The second half of that fateful summer was to be spent on a rock outcropping on the Penobscot Bay in Brooklin, Maine spending my second August as the nanny of one perfect child belonging to the fiction editor of the New Yorker and his lovely wife, Roger and Carol Angell. John Henry was E.B. White and Katherine White’s grandson. They were literary royalty, but everything was normal. Andy, whom we called E.B. Andy, would bring us fresh eggs and talk about death, Katherine summoned me to tea and was intimidating as only a brilliant old lady could be ignoring John Henry’s pulling of my hair to ask me questions about my reading habits. I was treated like family, but it wasn’t just my outside appearance that had changed, I was no longer the teenager who loved her job and read a novel a week. My rage at the rejection of my chosen groom and my hurt feelings made me ripe for chaos. Walking down to the Brooklin post office to see if my desperate letter to the leader of our bicycle trip had been answered, a letter detailing all the reasons we could be together despite our age difference, a car passed slowly, a tricked-out Mustang with a muscular brown arm on the driver’s side, a good-looking boy smoking a cigarette, leaned out.
“Hey,” he said.
I kept walking.
“I know who you are.”
I didn’t look up and walked toward the post office faster.
Inside the post office there were several letters. One from Cynthia, one from my father, and one with unfamiliar handwriting, a postmark from the state where he lived. I opened it and started reading.
Dear Molly,
What you describe as love was just animal attraction, two people, one who happens to be a child, desiring one another. Someday you will understand what you felt. Meanwhile, I wish you the best.
The burn of my humiliation spread across my face. He thought I was an animal; he saw me as a child, and he barely acknowledged any of the things I had told him in my letter. I felt rage like a wave through my body. I looked up, and the Mustang owner was standing in front of me.
“Letter from your boyfriend?”
“I don’t have a boyfriend.” I looked at him and realized from the way he was staring at me in my cut-off jeans, tank top, blonde streaked hair, and face that had finally become like a face in a movie he wanted me more than anything in his life, and I decided that was enough. It had to be enough. I no longer cared.
“When’s your day off.”
“Tomorrow.”
“I’ll pick you up at three.”
Roger was displeased with the news I had a date. He mumbled something about the local boys being wrong for me, but wrong was fine. Wrong was exactly what I wanted.
On the first date of my life, with a lobster fisherman who had been watching me since my arrival, I got drunk, was slapped around, and then raped. I downed several beers, a shot of tequila, and most of a bottle of wine on an empty stomach. When he pushed me flat in the back seat, I resisted, and he hit me hard. Before I could see past the stars, I was having sex, his hand pushing my face against the seat smelled of fish, and the sounds he made me think we were animals. My resistance came with the realization that I deserved so much more, so much better, so much kinder, and sweeter, and this would be a terrible mistake. I sobbed as he fucked me, sobbed for the mistakes I had made already, for the understanding this experience could never be undone.
With the skill of a Ninja, I made it home with the family asleep in their beds, took a bath, and transformed back into the perfect babysitter. I became the perfect babysitter who drank at night, given any opportunity. I so loved that little boy, but if I didn’t drink when he was asleep and I was alone, I replayed the worst of that terrible night. The rapist told me it was my fault I had made him rape me; I was slutty, beautiful, and way too smart. I was a beautiful bitch, a cock tease, a whore. Maybe, but I was also fifteen, had just had my braces taken off, and had no idea the effect I had on men with my sophisticated chatter about D.H. Lawrence. I was breathtakingly ignorant about sex, and while I had imagined a flower-bedecked seduction a la Lady Chatterley’s Lover, nothing prepared me for the cruel, sweaty, painful experience of male rage. I felt cheated, but I also discovered denial. If you pretend you don’t feel, you cease to hurt.
However, I returned to New Jersey determined to finally speak to my mother about the rape, the drinking, my heartbreak, fear, and shame. I drove back to New York City with Roger while Carol flew home with John Henry. We discussed books and art while I wondered whether he would ever realize his perfect babysitter was a drunken slut. Although I had been raised without religion, guilt was something I felt deeply. My guilt about being victimized, about being drunk, about lying, and my guilt about having had sex were extreme. I took the bus home from Port Authority and was dropped off at the mailbox across the street. Gone for nearly three months, I had spoken to my parents just twice, dropping quarters into a Laundromat pay phone and once from Maine. When I opened the door to the house, it was clear something was very wrong. I walked into the dining room, and there was the huge steel and glass table, smashed to bits; only the frame remained, a pile of broken glass in the middle of the rug we brought home from Spain. Brigid was crying in the living room. My parents were nowhere to be seen.
“What happened?” She was about to start her freshman year at the University of Wisconsin, while I would start my first year at Princeton Day School, entering tenth grade.
“Daddy got drunk and threw Al out of the house. There was a huge fight, and they’re gone.”
“Daddy?”
“All of them. Catherine said she’s never coming back.”
Al Nash was Catherine’s latest boyfriend. Her first, Darbs, was a handsome African American Harvard pre-med active in the Black Panthers. Given her whiteness, Catherine was not a good choice in the turmoil that marked 1968. Al came from a very wealthy family, possibly exacerbating the tension between him and my father. Also, despite his hippie appearance, Al belonged to an exclusive Princeton University Eating Club. When my father was a professor at Princeton, we were very little, I was barely born. But there were family stories about Princeton students throwing cherry bombs at us because we were too noisy early in the morning, and the time my father rescued a gang-raped prostitute thrown out of a window by a group of drunk Princeton undergraduates made it clear daddy viewed them as spoiled and destructive. My mother frequently pointed out that the section of Princeton where most African Americans lived was where Princeton boys housed their slaves. Catherine and Al dressed in matching mechanic overalls, slept late in the morning, and generally caused tension in the house that happened to have exploded the night before I returned from Maine.
“Is that my lambie pie?”
My mother’s voice came from upstairs. I slowly walked up, running my hand along the wooden banister, wondering if she had black eyes or something broken. It wasn’t as bad as I feared, just her looking very hung-over. My starting a new school the next day was not anyone’s concern.
“The table’s smashed. There’s glass all over the floor.”
Leaving for nearly three months, I’d expected some sort of welcome or just normal life, but everything felt chaotic and ruined. My mother sighed. These sighs had been a constant. I’d spent my childhood trying to make her happy, things better, her less angry, inventing distractions so my parents wouldn’t drink so much. But her happiness depended on my brilliant, funny, scary, wonderful, cruel father. Until my father came back, she would be sad. For the first time, possibly, I saw how unfair it was to be parented by two people determined to place their own feelings and happiness first. I didn’t want to make my mother feel better. She deserved the pain. I wanted to know where Catherine had gone and when she would return. I could be helpful and fetch her pillow when she lay on her stomach to watch TV. I could tell her what happened to me. I would follow her anywhere.
I went downstairs and picked up all the broken glass. If you put things away, they never happened. I poured myself a mug full of warm vodka. It tasted horrible. I couldn’t tell anyone about the rape. She would yell at me and then get sadder. She would blame me for making someone rape me. I was a whore and a slut, just as the lobster fisherman said. My mother called me lambie pie, but I was a cock-teasing bitch. My room in the attic was stark, painted white with slanted ceilings, a bed built into the wall by my mother resisting my pleas for a canopy bed. A desk and a bookshelf filled with books, nothing teenage. A few stuffed animals that survived the purge, some glass animals a cleaning lady had given me. I had read The Glass Menagerie and recognized I was as lonely and damaged as Williams’ character.
Listening to the raised, angry voices of drunken adults had been the flipside of my happy, privileged childhood. Years spent traveling on Ocean Liners, living abroad, meeting famous writers and artists, summers in Spain, and Christmas in Paris had abruptly ended when my oldest sister went to Radcliffe, and the glass house shattered. And it wasn’t a glass house but a brown-shingled tenant farmer’s abode, which, until I started high school, had no heat in the attic or air conditioning anywhere. During hunting season, we were told to wear bright colors and sing, “I am human, please don’t shoot me.” It was paradise for younger children with brooks and barns full of high beams we’d scoot across, hay bales to jump into, and fireflies to chase. Nature was cruel but less cruel than the social life of Princeton. Despite poison ivy, falls, scratches from burrs, and puncture wounds from rusty nails, until Catherine went to college, there was a sense of family, of a shared sense that we were connected to each other.
But that would not survive the Vietnam War, my sister’s pursuit of drugs, my father’s drinking, my mother’s denial, and insistence that you reject pain as proof of loyalty. The summer before Catherine left for Radcliffe, there was a mural contest held in downtown Princeton to decorate the fence that hid a giant hole in the ground dug for the new University Library. Catherine wrote out the Yeats poem, Leda and the Swan, in her perfect italic, accompanied by a very explicit depiction of the event with the swan clearly raping Leda. On the next blank space, someone had written in huge block letters, LIBERATE ULSTER. At that stage of the Irish troubles, my family still supported the IRA. After too much wine, my parents would listen to The Travelling People and talk about Ireland as if they’d been born there when in fact, only my Grandmother Molly, my namesake, had. Princeton was an orange, protestant town, so my parents were delighted with the slogan. The town fathers less so. Daddy took out his “Irish groveling hat” and threatened to grovel on the lawn of the richest people in town who lived on Library Place.
I was lost, marked by loneliness and fear that love would ultimately fail. Barefoot until the snow fell, my hair a wild tangle, so Catherine used to whisper “lait,” referencing Truffaut’s Wild Child raised by wolves. My daydreams focused on abduction, innocent at first but then sexual, the Snow Queen became a terrorist, reading about Patty Hearst, I wondered whether it was a relief to stay alone in the dark, away from the yelling. Neglect wasn’t abuse I told myself. Nothing I did much mattered, but the wolves occasionally told me I was pretty or smart, and that should be enough. Attention frightened me because it signaled that something was wrong or something terrible had happened.
In the winter of my senior year in high school, I went to Vermont with Catherine to stay with Natalie, her friend from Radcliffe, and Natalie’s brother, who was in his mid-twenties and very charming. We went snowshoeing alone, leaving Catherine and Natalie to drink before the fire. The moon was incredibly full and bright, with stars piercing the blue-black sky. We walked through the woods, the air was as sharp as a blade against our skin, the sound of invisible creatures scattering as we approached, and the crack of frozen branches. We stopped in a clearing and he looked down at me.
“How pretty you are,” he said. “Are you the family beauty?”
I shook my head. “Brigid’s the family beauty,” I said.
He laughed. “Ah, labels! Well, Catherine’s a genius, so what’s your label?”
“I’m a whore, and I read too much.”
He kissed me, and we lay down together briefly to look at the stars. When we returned, I sat with Catherine in front of the fire.
“Mom and dad should pay more attention to you,” she said. “Is it hard being an only child?”
I shrugged. Things were different. During my senior year in high school, my mother went to Utah to teach, leaving me with my father until he joined her later in the year. I made him pork chops that were basically all I knew how to cook, and he drank much more than usual. After he left several graduate students’ house-sat. We could now eat dinner in front of the television. If I could drink without getting in trouble, I didn’t care if they neglected me.
“Are you okay?” Catherine asked, touching my face softly.
I shook my head. No one ever asked me that. I just heard how disappointing my behavior was, shame, and yet if I tried to tell the truth, I was accused of lying.
“They’re so selfish,” she said. “Unless you really hurt yourself, they don’t care. If you try to escape, they pull you back.”
Did she want to escape? The idea of Catherine disappearing filled me with fear.
“I miss you so much. I hate being the only child.”
“Listen, Molser, just hold on. When you leave, you’ll understand things better, and you’ll realize it isn’t your fault that they don’t care whether you’re safe or happy. When you don’t need them anymore, when you feel whole, everything will be better.”
I missed the connecting bus to Princeton from the train I took from Vermont. I had told my parents when I’d be back, but they didn’t remember. I spent the night sitting against a wall in Port Authority, watching as junkies, prostitutes, and street people roved around searching for business or someplace to sleep. In 1974 New York City was very dangerous. I had called my parents to say I had missed the bus, but no one would make the drive to pick me up. I was in hell’s Kitchen, a seventeen-year-old girl alone in the night.
Years later, a therapist would say, “Your parents were monsters. Terrible, beautiful monsters.”
“But I love them. They are my monsters.”
Literature was a constant in my life. I read a novel a week, Austen, Woolf, Dickens, Drabble, in Maine, and my consumption at home was nearly as constant. But nothing light or silly. There was no room in my parent’s house for Judy Blume or the forbidden Nancy Drew. There was no junk food, no television other than an hour on weekends, no sugar or cartoons, and nothing disposable or convenient. If candy was craved, fudge would be made or brittle. We were constantly boiling sugar, burning out the bottoms of my mother’s pans with our need for something sweet. That night, when I returned from Maine, I sat on my bed, drinking warm vodka, and felt my heart become ice, like my favorite fairy tale, The Snow Queen; everything was ruined and ugly because of the splinter of glass that had pierced my eyes. No one seemed to notice that I had been away or come back. My father was missing, and Catherine was gone.
Brigid was crying in the living room.
“I can’t wait to go to Wisconsin. I hate them.”
I felt numb, which made the fear subside. While I had always despised alcohol for what it did to my father, I knew I had discovered something that would help me survive. I wanted to leave because I felt like leaving would help me survive. I didn’t leave, and I barely survived. Princeton Day School was where Catherine spent her final year of high school after our return from London. Brigid spent two years, and I would spend three. Since Cynthia’s departure, I had failed to make another real friend at Lawrence High School. In eighth grade, I had been the beard for a girl who was having sex with our history teacher, a horrible person named William Tucker. I was her partner on a Humanities project that included field trips to an orphanage mainly filled with brain-damaged children abandoned by their parents. During these visits, I took pictures and wrote about the orphans while she made out with our teacher in the car. One night we were babysitting near where he lived, and he came over, his hand bandaged.
“What happened to your hand?” I asked.
“My wife stabbed me with a fork.”
I looked into his red face with his piggy eyes and imagined him naked. The adult world appeared even more disgusting. Shuddering, I pretended not to notice them disappearing upstairs. Eventually, they were caught when she didn’t come home, and I failed to provide an alibi. She was sent to an all-girls Catholic school, and I told my mother something “weird” happened. Mr. Tucker taught history until retirement. In my yearbook, he wrote: “Sorry we were such a disappointment.
The Christmas of tenth grade, I restaged the loss of my virginity. Maybe I had been raped, but no one knew anything about what had happened, and I could rewrite this mess into something romantic. While most of the friendships had been formed since kindergarten at PDS, I made a new friend named who invited me to spend the night. Her parents had a separate wing, and her father made hard cider, which we were allowed to drink despite its hardness. Marita was my biology partner, a role that required extreme patience as I constantly misplaced my biology notebook despite this lack of organization was a favorite of our biology teacher, Mr. Robeson, an eccentric man who told interesting stories such as the one about the Princeton hostess who poisoned a hundred people at a party serving Swedish meatballs. Somehow, he connected these anecdotes with something biological. When I leaned over a Bunsen burner and set my hair on fire, Mr. Robeson barely blinked, handing me a pair of scissors. “Dear, dear,” he said. “Give yourself a haircut.”
In the fall, we took a field trip to the New Jersey Pine Barrens to study the deciduous forest of wild plants that didn’t grow anywhere else. Marita was sick, so I was partnered with another girl who offered to share her hash with me before we boarded the school bus. When we reached the Pine Barrens, I was completely stoned and remained on the bus with her after everyone got off, stealing treats from other kids’ lunches. I staggered around, drawing stuff that was basically Christmas Trees and stars, the two things I could draw until Eleanor Foreman, an extremely strange girl from the grade below, managed to walk into quicksand, and Mr. Robeson suggested we time her as she slowly sank. Eventually, we formed a human chain and pulled her to safety.
When I invariably stumbled across the creaking board while I attempted to sneak into the house, my mother would appear at the top of the stairs in a flannel nightgown, wild-eyed, her hair sticking out in all directions.
“You’re drunk.” She’d say.
“I’m not.”
“Yes, you are very drunk.”
“I’m just tired.”
“You’ve been drinking.”
I’d mount the stairs, avoid breathing on her, run up the second set of stairs to the attic and sit on my bed, my brain slowed by alcohol and pot but still wishing my fucking parents would leave me alone. My father was never part of these scenes, but somehow, it felt like they colluded on the constant accusation of my being drunk, which I was, unaccompanied by any solution, offer of help, or questions as to why. Mornings were marked by a frosty silence, lots of martyred sighs from my mother, my father avoiding eye contact while the hangover made me long to stab myself in the eye.
That Christmas break, I was invited by Marita to spend a week with her family in a condominium at Stowe. Marita and her brother were excellent skiers, but I signed up for lessons and spent most of my time on the bunny slope with Marita’s mother, who had skied for years but went downhill so slowly that she was practically at a standstill much of the time. Marita’s father stayed in the condo listening to jazz, reading The New Yorker, and coordinating dinner plans. Her older brother brought his very annoying, very short girlfriend, Helen. Since the height disparity was so extreme, Marita’s brother was very tall, we spent much of our time discussing how awkward it must be to have sex. When her parents announced they would return to Princeton three days early with Helen’s annoying mother, who was very bossy and also extremely short, we were happy to be left in her brother’s care. Marita rarely wanted to go out despite our having fake IDs. She preferred sitting in the condo listening to Yes, Joni Mitchell and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, drinking white wine, and talking about her feelings. I wanted to go out to the bars, get drunk and pick up men.
“I need cigarettes.”
Marita stared at me over her third tumbler of wine. She was feeling sad because her brother’s best friend kept sleeping with her but would not acknowledge her as his girlfriend. This conversation invariably ended with Marita sobbing about the unfairness of it all while I tried to say things that pointed out what a jerk this boy was without going so far; she felt stupid for liking him.
“You want me to come?”
No, I’ll be quick.”
“Okay.”
From upstairs came sounds of Marita’s brother and Helen doing something ridiculous, considering the distance between them.
“Way to chaperone,” I said, trying to cheer up Marita. But she was deep into a Joni Mitchell song about rotten boyfriends.
Most of the stores around our condo closed at seven. I ended up walking into a bar and asking the bartender for change for the cigarette machine. He was really good-looking and smiled at me, leaning on the bar and making eye contact. He had beautiful eyes.
“You want a drink?”
I didn’t have my fake ID but I was dressed in the navy sailor pants I bought at Marine Supply in Provincetown and a black sweater. My hair was twisted up in a clip. I must have looked older.
“I don’t have any money.”
He shrugged. “You can be my canary in a coal mine. What’s your poison?”
I slid onto the bar stool like a pro. “Surprise me.”
If you smiled, widened your eyes, flipped your hair, shrugged your shoulders, men were putty. My job was to reflect them, make them feel powerful and protective, witty and sexy and desirable. Never mind if I was bored out of my skull or thinking I should have read that extra chapter in biology. As long as I seemed entranced and asked an occasional question, they were content. Provided I had a certain amount to drink, I did this perfectly. If I drank too much, I would transform into the Queen of Darkness.
“Voila.” The drink was clear and then all pink and yellow. “It’s a Tequila Sunrise.”
I took a swig. “Yum!” It was strong but also sweet. I showed my good side, the high cheekbones, and dimple.
“Where are you from?”
“Princeton, New Jersey.”
“An Ivy League girl! I better watch it.”
The drinking age in 1973 was 18. I knew he thought I was in college. I wanted to sleep with him to go to Planned Parenthood like my classmates and get on the pill. Never mind that I didn’t have a boyfriend. Never mind that I wasn’t a virgin. Never mind that I hated sex. You were supposed to have it and then figure out whether you actually liked or trusted the person you had just fucked. If you didn’t, it didn’t matter. You just didn’t do it again if you were lucky. I looked at the clock over the bar and saw I had been gone for nearly an hour.
“I have to go,” I said, sliding off the barstool. “My friend’s waiting for me.”
“Can I take you out tomorrow? It’s my night off.”
I nodded.
“Meet me at the Lazy Eye,” he said, naming a popular bar down the street. “I’ll take you to dinner.”
He leaned across the bar and kissed me lightly on the lips. He smelled nice, like soap and lemons. Close up, his skin was the color of caramel. “You’re beautiful,” he whispered.
When I got back to the condo, Marita was plastered. The lights were low, candles were burning, and Roberta Flack singing, “The First Time Ever I saw Your Face.”
“Didn’t they come downstairs?” I indicated her brother and his stupid, stunted girlfriend.
She shook her head. “Where have you been?” Her voice wobbled. Marita was bad at meeting men. When we went out, she got intimidated and gloomy like Eyeore while I was more like Tigger, bouncy and fun. Most men liked Tigger better.
“I met this bartender who asked me out tomorrow. “
“We’re leaving the next day.” Her voice shook even more.
“So? I’ll be ready. Hey, let’s put on our ski boots and clomp up and down outside their room. I’m starving.”
Marita’s brother was nice, but Helen was awful. After a few minutes of clomping, he opened the door and threw out $20.00. We skied the next day, but it was windy and icy. When we got back to the Condo, we all took naps. Marita’s brother said he would drive me to meet the bartender, whose name was Bradley.
“How do you know him?” Helen asked.
“He’s a bartender. I met him at his bar.”
Helen made a sour face. “Are you going to let her go?” she asked Marita’s brother.
He shrugged. “She’s a free agent,” he said.
“Maybe we should all go,” Helen said.
Marita rescued me. “No. I’ll tell my parents you never left the bedroom, and we had to listen to all that sex noise.”
But then all the clocks were wrong, and I was an hour late. Maybe the power went out or something. Marita’s brother waited in the car while I went to see if he was still at the bar. The bartender said Bradley asked him to tell me he was going on to the restaurant in case I arrived. Marita’s brother drove me there, and I recognized Bradley’s VW Beetle with its bumper sticker that said: War is stupid.
“Call if you need a ride home.” Marita’s brother said.
Bradley was sitting at the bar reading a book.
“I knew you didn’t stand me up,” he said.
“The clocks were wrong.” I slid onto the bar stool next to him.
He nodded. “Have you read this?” He flashed the cover. Predictably it was Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. I hadn’t read it, but so many people had described it in such detail that I felt like I had. My father said it was overrated junk.
“Uh-huh.”
Bradley started describing his quest and why his spiritual path had brought him to Vermont. He seemed like a nice person. Not that smart but I didn’t care. No one knew I had been raped and slapped around. If I had a nice time with Bradley, this could become my official loss of virginity story. We drove for about five miles out of town along hilly, twisty roads that reminded me of the roads behind the school, which we drove stoned during lunchtime. There was snow piled high, and Bradley put his hand on my knee while I looked out the window and thought about driving back to Princeton from New York City when I was a child, looking across Fresh Kills and the mysterious wasteland between Manhattan and Princeton. Sometimes there would be a fire burning far in the distance, and I would imagine myself lost in that darkness for the very pleasure of recognizing I was snug and safe with my sisters, daddy driving, and a murmured conversation in the front seat. Now felt different but still not scary.
His house was in the middle of a snowfield, and if there was a movie of my life that portrayed the ideal experience of your first time having sex, this was it, nothing like being slapped around in the back seat of a car. Bradley lived in an A-frame, snug with a tiled floor, full of homemade furniture, wall hangings, area rugs from far away, and nice art. This time there would be no punch in the face or someone muttering “Fucking whore” or tears or disgust. Everything smelled good. He built a fire, lit candles that burned lavender, and put on soft acoustic guitar music. After bringing me a glass of wine, he kissed me, slowly undressed me, and we had sex on the rug. This time it didn’t hurt. It didn’t feel like much of anything. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking; “I’m having sex for the first time. This is what sex feels like. I’m not afraid.”
Afterward, he fell asleep, and I walked around naked, touching things, elephants carved from black onyx, velvet throws, feathers and shells, thick curtains that I opened to look across the frozen snowfields, the moon casting a path of silver light, admiring my own curving form, pressing my breasts against the glass which made me shiver. I was simply alive. Not happy or sad. Awake. The fire burned down, and by its flickering light, I looked at him and whispered, “Thank you.”
In the morning, he made us an omelet, explaining he had learned to cook from his mother, who said all things should be done with grace and love. He was a very kind, handsome man, and I felt lucky to have had sex with him, but nothing else he said affected me. I wanted to go home and forget his name. I would go to Planned Parenthood and get birth control, and the rape would not exist. I would be transformed from a stupid child who didn’t understand men, a bad girl who made boys angry, to someone who made choices. When the lobster fisherman cried on my shoulder and said he fucked me because I was beautiful, I’d wanted him to die. I had wanted to kill him with a rock or a knife, which made me a terrible person. I hated violence, and now I had succeeded in seducing a gentle man I hoped never to see again. The fall after the rape, I found an old journal in one of my desk drawers where I had written inside a box decorated with hearts, “The first time I make love, I want it to be with someone I trust and love. I want it to be somewhere beautiful.” This was the imagined scenario, not the actual moment in the car, frightened and drunk. I hated that girl for her hopefulness and what I perceived as stupidity. I had no understanding of what fueled passion or desire. I had no idea what men thought or felt. My ignorance struck deep, and the desire to drink in order to numb my own shame increased ten-fold. I looked at my Vermont lover with pity and contempt. He thought we had been close, and I had used him to create a new narrative, an acceptable story about how I lost my virginity.
I remembered I was supposed to have finished reading The Return of the Native before Christmas break ended. I would have to finish it in the car driving back to New Jersey. I felt tired and ready to leave. All my clothes were strewn around the living room. As I dressed, Bradley watched me as if I were bewitching.
“When will you come back?” he asked, smoothing down my hair.
I ducked away from his hand. “I don’t know, but I have to go now.”
My black clothes were covered in rabbit fur from his rug. Driving towards the condo, we stopped behind a yellow school bus picking up a little kid. I forgot who was driving the car.
“Shit!” I said. “I’ll be riding one of those on Monday.”
Bradley pulled over on the side of the road and put the car in park. “How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“You never asked.”
“The drinking age in Vermont is 21.”
“You never checked.”
He shook his head. “I have a fourteen-year-old daughter who lives with her mom in Burlington.” He sighed. “I wanted you to visit on your next break from college.”
“Maybe I could still come.”
“Why are you treating yourself like this? Molly, who hurt you?”
I felt badly that I had hurt him but I also felt nothing. It was necessary to change the truth. Now my history was different. This was crucial so I didn’t spend the rest of my life feeling like a victim. If I’d known how hard the future was destined to be I may have asked this man for help or at least advice but receiving support from a stranger when my own parents ignored me was too painful. Anyway, plenty of adults slept with teenagers.
“You shouldn’t feel bad. I knew what I was doing.”
“How could you?” He picked up my hand and kissed it. “You still have dimples,” he said, staring at my pudgy knuckles.
“Make sure your daughter knows you love her,” I said. “Don’t think she knows already.”
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach