Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [23]
Smoking wasn’t particularly frowned upon, either. You couldn’t smoke in front of Dad, from his own asthma he seemed to have some idea that children shouldn’t smoke, but Mom didn’t object too much as long as you didn’t smoke her cigarettes. She kept her cartons of cigarettes in a drawer in the kitchen and she was beginning to notice that packs were being opened rather savagely as if by a novice. Julia and I denied smoking her brand and were vindicated when the novices turned out to be rats living in our basement who would come up into the kitchen drawers at night and eat her cigarettes. Her children smoking her stash was bad enough, but rats, they could damn well get their own cigarettes. She promptly called an exterminator.
My dad made me take Princeton Review, the SAT preparation course, on Saturday mornings. It was expensive, over five hundred dollars, and I went up ten whole points after taking it (not the kind of dramatic improvement they advertised). My father then decided I needed more one-on-one help, since that had worked such wonders with April Dean. He hired a tutor named Mr. Burnham to come on Sunday mornings. The first Sunday he came I forgot he was coming and had been out at some swanky party in the woods near the Metro-North train tracks with my friends. There was a knock on my bedroom door.
“Jean-Joe, are you decent? Mr. Burnham’s here. Throw some sweatpants on and get downstairs. Posthaste.”
I made my way downstairs and met Mr. Burnham. Unbeknownst to me, I had a giant hickey on my neck.
“Jesus, Jean-Joe, it looks like you were attacked by Cujo last night.” My father put some spit on his finger and tried to rub the mysterious red blot with teeth marks off my neck.
“What in God’s name is that?” my father said before I pushed him away and ran to the toaster to get a look.
The summer before my senior year in high school I got a break from SAT mania by going to Nantucket to be a mother’s helper for my mother’s friend from college. I had my driver’s test coming up but I was supposed to be in Nantucket on the day of the test and I couldn’t leave the job and come back and take my test for one day, so I came up with the logical solution of getting someone else to take it for me. If I had asked Eleanor or Katharine to take my road test, a felony, they would have thought of their futures, their ability to get jobs, have a clean record. Julia simply said, “Yeah, okay. What time?”
She did great. She passed. My dad was especially proud, mailing my new license to me with a short note, “Congratulations, Jean-Joe. You passed! Love, Dad.”
Patty Henley had two boys, Christopher and Simon. They were five and eight. Mrs. Henley had just been left by her husband for a younger woman and she was fairly wrecked over it. Man, these class of ’62 Manhattanville grads could cry at night. She had been spending summers in Nantucket for years, always renting the same house near her friends. This family had three gorgeous daughters, one of whom was an actress on a soap opera. That summer one of them was on crutches, and to me being a beautiful woman on crutches was an unbeatable combination. My sisters and I weren’t allowed to break anything as we had no health insurance. I really envied anyone with a broken arm or leg. So extravagant! Maybe someday. I was friendless on that pink and green isle, so one night I decided