Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [25]
“She probably hocked something of Nonnie’s. St. Croix. You see you’re not listening!”
“Taos. St. Croix. What’s the diff? She’ll come back eventually. With four hideous white sweatshirts with toucans on them or something and that’ll be that. I wouldn’t worry too much about it.” Sound of a page turning. A thick turn, maybe a magazine.
She wanted to help me become, not cool because that she couldn’t help me with, but me. Only less of an asshole. Doesn’t mean she stopped reading while I poured my guts out to her, but she was there for me in some profoundly distracted way.
Katharine was herself a pragmatic person but unlike Eleanor, she admired risk-takers, she liked ideas and literature and writers, she believed in people. She loved whatever part of them was lovable and ignored the rest of them. This was nothing less than a magic trick to me. How can you ignore such gigantic, in Mom’s case, lapses in judgment, strength, maternal instinct? How can you discard the self-obsession of her ilk? She went to fancy schools and owned horses and had sports cars given to her at sixteen, and we were supposed to feel bad that that was all over and had been replaced by, let’s face it, us. Her sister, our aunt Ruth, was living her life in California and she wasn’t turning to dust every night at five o’clock. People moved on. Didn’t they? From some bullshit idea of what they thought they had coming to them? Somewhere? Somewhere, I was sure, there were people who moved on, people who realized how good they fucking had it and didn’t go over the same stupid crap every night.
Mom had taken to occasionally sleeping on an orange cot on the lawn and Katharine would come home for a weekend and simply pull up a chair and bring out some iced tea and the New York Times Sunday crossword, and the two of them would spend the day in the sun drinking iced tea and deliberating over a six-letter word for the opposite of a bad design (W-R-I-G-H-T).
I WAS FURIOUS AT MOM, and yet I also knew I was an alcoholic like her from the first time I drank. I guzzled tons of champagne at Eleanor’s graduation party and before I went to bed I stole another bottle of it and put it in an old dirty tire that was in the way back of the Torino for my next drinking binge. I woke up and hardly remembered anything of the party. I remembered a champagne fountain and strawberries and drinking with Julia and then I remembered stealing the champagne. I dragged myself out of bed and ran to the car to make sure it was still there. I knew this was a little odd. To wake up in the morning and locate my next drink. I knew it wasn’t normal to not remember things when drinking. I knew I was like Mom. This was not good. So how, I thought, how can I get away with it? How can I drink and not turn into Mom? I guess don’t get married, don’t own a chaise longue, don’t smoke (too late), don’t be five feet tall, okay good, I’m already five feet five, don’t be rich and spoiled, check, don’t cry all the time, no problem, don’t dye your hair blond, okay. Most of all don’t drink Dewar’s scotch. Now, that’s easy. Maybe I could do this.
THE TREASURER’S REPORT
TO KNOW MY FATHER is to know “The Treasurer’s Report,” a monologue written by Robert Benchley of the Algonquin Round Table. It was written in 1922 for a live revue show and later made into a short film starring Benchley. I don’t remember a time when he wasn’t pushing it on us. Benchley plays an assistant treasurer for a boys’ club who is forced to go on for the absent treasurer at the annual dinner gala and give the financial report of the organization. He’s the world’s biggest bumbler but in a very endearing way, giving this dry, dry report. It is a very funny piece but as outdated as my dad’s wooden shoehorns. It felt like old white guy stuff to us. He had gotten us to love old white guy stuff like the Andrews Sisters and Abbott and Costello and the Marx Brothers, but these could pass for entertainment, whereas the Benchley piece was literature, albeit comic,