Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [29]
Maybe she had to drink so much because all that crying was drying her system out and making her thirsty. The crying was like a Tony Kushner play—it started one night and ended three nights later. “I’m dying! I’m dying, baby!” she’d call out as you were heading out the front door. “Daddy was never around, you know. Never a-round!” There was so much boohooing and theatrics that we did become fairly used to it. “I’m completely alone. ALONE! Did you hear what I said?” she’d wail as Julia and Katharine and I tried to watch a movie. “Yes, we heard you. We heard you. You’re alone. Can you go be alone by yourself somewhere? We can’t hear the movie.”
Mom apparently decided to dust herself off and not be so alone, because she now had a friend in Bronxville. This was when things really got out of control. Kitty Lagasse was a drunk and a dress designer whose clothing line was kaput for unknown reasons. Kitty’s husband, a Belgian toy maker, had died of an early heart attack, and so Kitty now supported herself making graduation and prom and cotillion dresses for Bronxville’s junior set out of her house. Her work was inspired. She really did encourage bravery in her clients, her dresses asked you to be something more than you were, and you felt special when she yelled at you in the big, open living room of her small, modern house with the giant sloped glass window. “Stop schlumping your shoulders! For God’s sake! You’re becoming a woman, this is a good thing, throw away those old corduroys, let’s move on! You’re gonna be Ava Gardner just for one night if it kills me! Oh, these girls!” Kitty was the physical opposite of my mother; she was brunette and had a figure like Orson Welles. Kitty and my mother tended to get in a fair bit of trouble. They were like Lucy and Ethel, only completely besotted, coming up with ways to make money. Most of these ideas were never executed but one that did make it out of the barroom was their wine bags. They made beautiful gift bags for wine bottles with leftover fabric from Kitty’s dresses (plaid taffeta and hot pink ribbons at the top). They were really nice and a good idea—there was nothing like them, but the bags never went anywhere.
Kitty had lavish tastes, which got out of control and led her to do things like occasionally stuff a ham in her coat at the A&P. There was always an international cast of characters at her house who seemed to be shooting a Fellini film in her backyard. There was a nineteen-year-old Belgian boy living in her basement whom she was apparently screwing, and another nefarious character who claimed he’d been hanging out with Joan Didion in Guatemala the week before and who, it turned out, had been looting temples in Guatemala, without Joan Didion, and was storing the artifacts in Kitty’s basement.
Dad was not happy about this twosome at all. “That Kitty’s got the scruples of an Arab slave dealer.” Mom was no longer concerned with what Dad thought about anything. Or what any of us thought about what she was doing.
Her drinking was also completely out of control, which was infuriating, as I was trying to enjoy some out-of-control drinking myself. She was crowding the outfield.
One night I was at a kegger and my boyfriend walked up to me with a queer look on his face.
“Your mom’s here.”
Even though I was semi-smashed I understood the implications of one’s mother showing up at a kegger. I looked around at the groups of kids, my eyes scanning the CB ski jackets quickly, running over the Bronxville High School football jerseys, desperately trying to locate the small woman hell-bent on squashing my existence.
I hated Petey at this moment. I hated his jokey stockbroker father and his super-nice paddle-tennis-playing nonsexual yet attractive mother-woman, Pepper. I hated him for having an expensive car and for the fact that he didn’t black out and forget portions of evenings.
“She’s over there, pumping the keg, talking to Dennis