Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [17]
Mom was seriously on Dad’s case at this point. We needed food, clothes, ballroom-dance lessons. When something came up, my mother would raid the attic even though none of her things would fit any of us. The things in the trunks and boxes were seemingly from another culture entirely, like the mink stoles of Nonnie’s with the heads still on. The idea that women wore small animal heads around their shoulders to indicate status and superiority over non–animal-head-wearing women, women who couldn’t afford those little beady-eyed heads, was fascinating and nuts to me. The teeny bejeweled cat’s-eyes glasses with double thick lenses that Mom wore from about the age of six on were so small that the four of us could never wear them even if we happened to go blind. The white gloves were for the smallest hands imaginable, the hands of a toddler it seemed to us. None of us standard human-sized girls could wear these things that Mom once wore to cotillions and balls. Not the velvet-covered black riding hats—not the teeny beige chaps, not the teeny-tiny riding blazers.
In those days it was weird if your father was around all day; this was before flex-time and perma-lancers and job-sharing. You either had a job or you didn’t. I remember filling out forms for the Girl Scouts and coming upon “Father’s occupation: _____.”
“What should I say Dad does?” I called out to my mother.
“Freelance writer,” she’d yell and then mumble something under her breath. It was always a moment-by-moment call, what my father did. If he and my mother were getting along, he was a writer. If they were fighting, my mom might yell, “Absolutely nothing,” to my question. Being a writer was like being a baby in an Edward Albee play. Some days your writing existed, some days it didn’t, depending on how much people had had to drink, if you had been flirting with some professor down at Sarah Lawrence, if the car had died again and there was no money to fix it.
I remember being mortified when walking with some kids after school and seeing my dad coming out of the pretty red brick house that was the Bronxville library. Other people’s fathers spent the day with people, not microfiche.
“Freelance writer.” Surely my parents made this term up to define the hanging around my father did most days? Friends’ parents seemed confused when I’d say “freelance writer,” and I’d think, Drop it. Just drop it.
“Who does he write for?”
“Himself,” I would say.
“Oh, really! Anything I might have read?”
“Umm . . . not his novel, that wasn’t published . . . do you read Harper’s magazine? . . . or Commonweal? It’s a small Catholic magazine, very well regarded . . . he’s in The Norton Reader, too . . . what’s The Norton Reader? It’s um, an anthology . . .” It was a real pain in the ass having a writer for a dad in a town that wasn’t a haven for struggling artists or struggling anything. I heard Don DeLillo lived in Bronxville but I never saw his ass.
The people who did understand what freelance writer meant were my English teachers, a lot of whom were female, single, struggling writers who lived on the Upper West Side. To them, my dad was a gentleman artiste, someone maybe luckier than they as he didn’t have to teach, someone who was living it, baby. Dad was asked by my tenth-grade English teacher to come and teach a writing class. He came in a suit, of course—my dad wears a suit, and often a hat, to the coffeemaker. He read the story in the Bible, John 11:35, where a bereft Jesus goes to his friend Lazarus’s tomb and demands the stone from his tomb be removed and orders Lazarus out. My father read the shortest phrase in the Bible from that story. “Jesus wept,” my father said, as his audience grew groggy.
“Don’t ya just love that? Beautiful. It can’t be improved upon. If you can get your writing down to just what’s essential and then knock off