Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [28]
Stylebook was starting to drive Mom crazy. I knew he was going to get it handed to him. I saw him as a tragic hero. Like all tragic characters, he was trying to do the impossible—write novels, sell novels, make money, keep the drinking under control, get the cracked wife some help, take care of four kids. Like all tragic heroes he had a fundamental lack of self-awareness. Tragic characters don’t go to therapy, read self-help, do juice fasts or see psychics. They go blind, they’re banished from the kingdom, they hear ghosts. But they are good, noble in their pursuits, they just make bad decisions, have errors in judgment. He became increasingly saddening, if that’s a correct term. Some people are maddening, Dad was saddening. If Mom kicked him out would he be able to avoid the kind of solitary, elderly poverty that Grandma Darst, Crazy Kate, wound up in?
LES MISSOURABLES
MY FATHER MOVED his whole Stylebook operation into the kitchen. The kitchen was my mother’s office, so they were now sort of working at the same company.
“The man has moved his goddamn word processor into the kitchen. MY kitchen! I’m about ready to have a breakdown here. I mean it.”
Things were not good. Eleanor and Kate had to come home from college for a semester to work because Mom and Dad couldn’t pay their tuition. Like a professional chef, Mom was never hungry by the time dinner came around, never really ate a meal with us. She took one bite, lit a cigarette and began a sort of post-shift meltdown. We were, of course, the customers she was complaining about.
“Nobody cares. Nobody cares,” she would lament from her seat at the end of the dining room table as if she were all alone. “Do they have any idea how long it takes to fold those layers of white cake into the round buche shape without them falling apart in your hands? Hours. Hours! Do you think the Smiths across the street are having homemade bûche de Noël tonight for dessert? Hardly.”
We weren’t ungrateful, we were simply too busy stuffing our faces with food to compliment her cooking. By the time dinner rolled around it was usually going on ten o’clock. We’d already had about two bowls of cereal each just to last until dinner.
“Well, I guess everyone hates the boeuf bourguignon,” she’d sigh, brushing at a holey area of her shirt sleeve that had caught on fire earlier. When she said things like this I always imagined my father’s old surf-casting fishing rod being cast in our direction.
“No, Mom, it’s fantastic.”
“Mmm, yeah, so good,” Katharine would say.
“Doris, you’ve outdone yourself,” my dad would chime in.
“No it’s not. It’s dry. It’s dry and I’m going to bed.” And she’d pick up her glass of wine and her cigarettes and she’d weave up the front staircase to her bedroom and shut the door. That was more or less how my mother now said good night.
One night I went into my parents’ room and found my mother very upset and drunk.
“I’m going to do it. I am. I’m going to do it.” My mother expressed a desire to die around this time every night. I hung my head. Every day was hard for her now.
“I’m going to jump,” she said.
I looked at her and her body, slumped off to one side of the divan. She was approximately seven inches off the ground.
“Okay, well, whatever you think is best, Mom.”
“I mean it, dolly. I’m going to jump.”
“I understand.” And I walked out of her bedroom.
Dad would never, ever utter the “a” word or even talk about it as even in the bag of things that might be wrong with Mom.
When I said