All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [99]
In the summer of 1981, just before I began eighth grade, I did successfully book myself a Greyhound ticket to see him. One evening, my sister dropped me off at a depot in Nashville, and I rode alone for eleven hours overnight on a route that required multiple stops and bus changes to Ocala, Florida, where Dad had moved.
By then Dad was manager of sales and marketing at Florida Horse magazine and had also married a Lexington belle from a horsey family named Eleanor Van Meter. They were living in a cottage on a horse farm outside of Ocala. The arrangement was such an improvement that as my scheduled departure for Tennessee approached, I was relieved and pleased to hear that Dad, Eleanor, and I were harboring the same idea: I would live with them for my eighth-grade school year. Mom did not object, and Dad enrolled me in a private school, which I picked because they had cheerleader tryouts in the fall and I could maybe make the squad, and for a few months everything seemed great. Dad and Eleanor, however, were not as happy as they had seemed to me. Dad later shared that he had been too rigid to adjust to some of the changes and compromises a coupleship requires, and the brief marriage soon collapsed. One day before school, they were sitting at the kitchen table, looking quite somber. Strangely, Eleanor gave me a card that simply said, “Cheerio.” When I came home from school, she was gone and I never saw her again.
The split caused Dad to go through his own deep depression. When I approached him in the grocery store aisle, where he stood not moving, arms limp by his sides, and I asked if I could have a crap sugar cereal, and he said yes, I knew I was in trouble. That was completely against his fatherly values, and I knew something was wrong and he would not be able to care for me anytime soon. When I rode the bus back to see Mom for Thanksgiving, I was already devising my plan, writing letters to friends in Tennessee about how I couldn’t return to Florida after the holiday but how I couldn’t tell Dad in advance, because he’d be so mad at me. I thus wordlessly ditched my dad, and unintentionally gave my mother a smug victory over him, more fuel for her anti-Dad campaign.
Once I was back in my mother’s house, the savage scripts about him resumed at full throttle, and she was bound and determined to make sure we hated him as much as she did. I can recall only two visits he made to see us during the remaining years we lived on Del Rio Pike. But Dad told me that there were times when he drove to Tennessee to pick us up for a visit and Mom would make us hide in the house on Del Rio, turning out all the lights, until he finally gave up and left. I think I remember one of these stunts, hunkering in a dark house below window level, while Dad circled the house, hollering, but I can’t be sure.
The atmosphere in our shabby farmhouse careened between utter quiet—the kind of quiet that can only be caused by abandonment and neglect—and raw drama. Although they eventually married in 1989 and mostly settled down, during the Del Rio Pike years, Mom and Pop were locked in a toxic cycle of jealousy and betrayal, breaking up and getting back together. Periods of Pop’s extended absences were punctuated by his returns to Del Rio Pike, when we would play family. We’d have more meat with supper, and Mom would tell us girls to cheer up and act right when he was around. A horrific reality for me was that when Pop was around I would have to listen to a lot of loud sex in a house with thin walls. The tall wooden headboard of their bed would bump against a door between our rooms, which was excruciating to hear night after night. (As a result of treatment, I now know this situation