Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [116]
Cheever loved being a father in the abstract, but the everyday facts of the matter were often a letdown. He was dismayed by his oldest child, for one thing, as she continued to “overthrow his preconceptions” by remaining, as he put it, “a fat importunate girl.” Cheever was pitiless in judging female beauty—”You were either a dish or a drudge,” his wife repeatedly insisted—and when the young Susan failed to measure up, he was bewildered and sorry for all concerned. He'd wanted a “frail daughter,” after all, a “wraith” with long blond hair who drove a sports car and went by the kicky name of Susie. In any event they did call her Susie, but to Cheever's mind the name didn't jibe with the hoyden who chewed with her mouth open and said all the wrong things (“How long does it take to hang a man?”): “The tragic instant”—Cheever wrote, during a bad patch when his daughter was all of eight—“when a parent loses faith with his child.”
“They were completely unable to cope with me,” said Susan Cheever, after some fifty years of blessed retrospect. The main issue, as her parents always saw it, was her weight—if only she looked right, everything else would follow—and in a way that was true, since they harassed her so relentlessly on the subject that her behavior was mostly a matter of reprisal. They put her on diets, made her eat Ayds candies to cut her appetite, and kept up a constant running commentary on what she ate at dinner. Every so often, too, they'd invite her grossly obese pediatrician to the house so he could deliver a stern lecture to the little girl on the evils of overeating. Deprived of snacks and the like, Susan took to stealing food (and therefore eating many times what she would have eaten normally): she hollowed out cakes they were saving for company (leaving a “veneer of icing on top”); she rooted around in drawers, closets, and desks, searching for hidden chocolate and whatever else she could find. “They had no privacy,” she said. “I read everything in the house, I was in every secret compartment of every desk, I became like a little criminal. I was lying, I was cheating, I was stealing. Their cruelty about my weight was not one-way. We were in a dance of death on that subject.” Many years later, after Cheever had stopped drinking, he often assuaged his melancholy by gorging on cheese and crackers: “And I remember, as a father, how ruefully I separated my daughter from her crackers and cheese when all she sought, by stuffing herself, was to understand her place in the world.”
At the time he didn't see it that way; rather he regarded himself as a loving, well-meaning, long-suffering father who was simply trying to talk his only daughter out of being fat, whereas she in turn responded with unsavory remarks and tics such as banging her head against the wall and constantly sucking her thumb. She wasn't doing well in school either, and finally (at age eleven) they sent her to a psychiatrist in White Plains named Dr. Sobel. Apparently the man didn't see what all the fuss was about—certainly the girl was intelligent enough (“She has a Cadillac motor in there,” he observed). The parents were another matter: Dr. Sobel remarked that Mary was a “passive” personality, which (he opined) was why Cheever had married her, whereupon the affronted husband rose from his chair and stood protectively beside his wife. In his own version of the meeting, however, Cheever tended to omit that detail, informing Susan that what Sobel had really said (furtively taking him aside) was: “Be careful. If anyone looked