Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [20]
WHEN HE WASN’T IN his office, my dad hung around the kitchen, talking about Fitzgerald and reading aloud to my mother from a book of poetry by Keats, pointing out what Fitzgerald had stolen from Keats. I really think it was this kind of undergraduate behavior, lolling about reading poetry aloud and listening to Don Giovanni during lunch, that drove my mother into the arms of people like Barbara Taylor Bradford. She wanted to be left alone to flip through Jacques Pépin cookbooks and smoke and nap. My dad used to lament his predicament to me. “Jean-Joe, if I could do anything else I would. In a second.” He was letting me know the deal with writing and by extension, my lunch money. And maybe his relationship with Mom, his marriage. You didn’t write because you wanted to, you wrote because you had to. Mom was “livid, absolutely livid” six days out of seven. She had been supportive when they had four babies on a reporter’s income, when he moved us all to New York to write a novel, when the job at CBS ended and he didn’t get another one but started a second novel. She was running out of encouragement. I would worry about it at night, trying to fall asleep. “What the hell is going to happen to Dad?”
DUMBENTIA
MOM’S SUMMA CUM LAUDE routine got a little old after a few hundred mentions, and she’d never really had a job. Dad was a really good writer but he hadn’t written the Great American Novel. The stories about who we were, who they were, didn’t seem to match anything I saw. If we’re such longtime Catholics, if our ancestors built cathedrals, why do we go to church only twice a year, bombed out of our minds? If writers are so goddamn fascinating, why do they monopolize conversations and talk about their “projects” until you’re about ready to throw your sandwich at their heads? Dad’s artistic struggle, our financial high-wire act, meant that we were, I was, building character. Whatever the fuck that was. Their marriage seemed blighted. But they expected a hell of a lot from us. My mother was a stay-in-bed mom and my father was a stay-at-home writer, so I couldn’t help thinking, Why do I have to work so hard when you people sit around and drink coffee all day and pretend to do things?
These two layabouts demanded top performance in school, and socially we were supposed to be charming, entertaining, and “presentable.” If I had it right, I was supposed to have the manners of Tracy Lord from The Philadelphia Story and the mind of Murray Kempton. You couldn’t let your mouth hang open otherwise you’d look apish; a straight back was crucial, no gum chewing, but smoking cigs was well, there were worse things a teenager could do. Manners were everything, unless some investment banker at a cocktail party, some Solomon Brothers jackass, glanced at his watch as you talked about your novel outline, in which case it was okay to call him a horse’s ass, and definitely not out of line to throw a drink in his face. Growing up, I thought throwing a drink in someone’s face was the most natural thing in the world. You like someone? Ask him what you can get him to drink. Dislike someone? Throw a drink in his face. And yet our table manners—using the right fork, knowing the right way to cut meat, the right way to lean the fork at the top of the plate when you were finished—were constantly scrutinized. Now, if you wanted to stab someone in the