Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [2]
My mother’s mother didn’t want us to go and tried to haggle with my dad for my oldest sister, Eleanor, as we were leaving. The four of us girls were staking out our turf in the car, laying out candy we had just bought at the Rexall on Clayton Road to determine the order of consumption for the thousand-mile drive, when Nonnie walked over to the car, adjusted her big tortoiseshell frames as if getting ready to start a press conference, and said to my father, “Eleanor does not want to go to New York. Eleanor should stay with me. She’ll have a better life here with me, food at regular hours, not at midnight and whatnot, and she’ll go to mass regularly and attend the Annunziata school, and she’ll be bathed properly, and she likes to watch Johnny Carson with us here on Friday nights.” I thought my dad should take her up on it, I mean, why not? Eleanor loved watching Johnny Carson with Nonnie and her sister Neallie on Nonnie’s big bed and having Jell-O boats at Stix, Baer & Fuller after some shopping. This was maybe not the profile of someone who wanted to head off into a year of “getting the novel together” on some remote farm halfway across the country. Now, I was up for New York, I was up for the ocean and living on a farm, which I would quickly discover had more New Yorker writers on it than cows or chickens, but I was ready to go and if Eleanor couldn’t cut it, well, we’d see her in a year, now let’s get going. St. Louis sucks, especially in the airless, way back of our station wagon.
My dad said he was taking all his kids with him, thank you, Mrs. Gissy, and “Let’s not get so damn dramatic, everybody,” we would all be back next spring. “It’s one year in New York.” My mother was crying, not because she didn’t want to go to New York; she did. She just had a light cry going most of the time, one that didn’t require a hanky, just a smooth stroke across her cheek to keep moving through the day. Like Seattlers who as a point of pride don’t use umbrellas in their eternally drippy town, my mother hissed if you offered up a Kleenex, the tool of tourists.
My grandmother walked around to the back of the car, leaned in the back window and said in full voice, “Anyone who wants to come back to St. Louis can come back and have their own room in my house, no questions asked. You’ve all memorized my phone number, so just call collect. Don’t worry, girls.”
It was easy to tell that my grandmother didn’t see this as a worthy adventure. I don’t remember any books in her house at all, other than the children’s books in the playroom she kept for her twelve grandchildren and the medical books my deceased grandfather left behind in the office where she paid bills and cut checks to charities like the St. Louis Society for the Blind. I never saw her read anything except Reader’s Digest. Seeing a copy of The Grapes of Wrath in her living room would have been like spotting a dead falcon on her coffee table. Maybe if my father were writing a novel in Braille, Nonnie would have seen some value in it, but as it was, he was ruining my mother’s life, taking her away from everything that meant anything—her. Nonnie looked at my father. She blew a kiss into the backseat.
“I’ll see you girls very soon.”
“Bye, Nonnie,” we said brightly, and waved, her words leading us to believe we were heading off on some kind of scavenger hunt, a yearlong one that would wind up with us watching a rousing game of bridge in her living room with her best pal, Monsignor Hartnett, and her do-gooding friends from Annunziata Church, smoking Carltons and having a Tom Collins or two.
“Good-bye, Mother,” my mother sighed. Although she was psychologically duct-taped to her mother, I never saw them physically touch. (I, on the other hand, was fine with symbolic behavior. By this age, seven, I had only recently stopped sucking on my mother’s neck at night while we all watched television.)
“Verena,” my father said, a verbal tip of the hat, and hit the gas as if we had the kind of car that could