Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [30]
“Great. Fucking great.”
“Doesn’t look like she’s here to break up the party.”
At that point I saw Dennis McSweeney stick his finger into my mother’s beer, showing her how to make the foam go down. My mother laughed and stuck her finger in her own beer as well. I walked over.
“Jean!” my mother yelped.
“Your mom’s the kegmeister now, Darst,” Dennis said.
“Is Petey here?” my mom said, but before I could get my mitts on her, I heard Kitty’s crazy drunkard voice coming toward us. She slurred her speech drunk or sober, but Kitty also had a broken volume-control button so her voice often just flew randomly into a much louder volume.
“Doris? Doris, where the hell are you? I’m LOST IN A SEA of tedious rugby shirts, oh God, NOTHING BUT PRIMARY COLORS, it’s really unbearable. Doris?” Kitty made it to the keg.
My mother pumped the keg and filled Stu Patterson’s red plastic cup with foamy beer. “How about a brewski?” Stu laughed and stuck his finger in his beer. “You might want to tilt the cup a little when you fill it, Mrs. Darst, keeps the foam down.”
“Okay, dear. Will do.”
“Mom, let’s go home. C’mon.” We locked eyes. Hers seemed to say, “Why would I want to leave this terrific party to go home with boring old you?”
“Doris, I have to agree,” Kitty said. “YOU’RE DOING a great job with that keg, but I’m JUST NOT A BEER PERSON. God, they don’t even have any wine at this party. Oh, these kids, I can’t stand it. The money, all the money these parents are shelling out for this ridiculous PRISON WEAR. What’s wrong with a great Geoffrey Beene wool suit? Or how about a FABULOUS FITTED JACQUARD BLAZER WITH A PAIR OF JEANS? I’m leaving, Doris.”
Kitty went home and I managed to wrest Mom away from her duties as kegmeister and walk her down the street back to our house. When we got there, I found Eleanor and Kate on the glass porch watching Saturday Night Live.
“Guess where I’ve been?”
They were hoping I might wait for a commercial to bug them. “Where?”
“At the Landers’, down the street.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, they had a party. Guess who was there?”
“I don’t know. Who?”
“Mom. Mom was at the party.”
Eleanor and Kate started giggling. Kate put a needlepoint pillow of a Picasso figure up to her face to hide her laughing.
Eleanor wanted to make sure she didn’t miss any more Saturday Night Live, so she jumped in: “Look, Jeanne, Mom said she was going to this party down the street. What were we supposed to do?”
“I tried to stop her, Jeanne,” Kate said, laughing even harder. “I swear.”
“Jeanne, you know you can’t stop Mom when she’s going to do something,” Eleanor said, picking up the clicker, preparing to unmute the TV.
“Right. Because she’s five-feet-zero and there are two of you guys.”
“Maybe no one noticed her at the party. She’s so teeny, no one probably even saw her except you,” Kate said, drying her eyes with her T-shirt.
“Yeah, no one noticed a forty-three-year-old in a black pencil skirt and panty hose doing beer bongs with Hugh Masterson.”
Kate gasped. Hugh Masterson was the first guy she’d made out with. “No!”
“And Kitty knocked over about five people on the way out.”
“Okay, shush, it’s Father Guido Sarducci,” Eleanor commanded.
IT GOT QUIET around the house. Mom and Dad stopped going at each other—verbally, nonverbally, Mom throwing wine bottles at Dad, charging at him, slipping once and getting a black eye—and started going away from each other. Attacking each other we understood, moving away was more complicated. A war was upon Eleven Hamilton Avenue. My mother’s base of operations was my parents’ bedroom, while my father had set up camp in Eleanor’s presidential suite on the third floor once Eleanor and Katharine went back to school. My mother wanted everyone’s sympathy. Dad wanted her to straighten up and be the old mama, the mama who was game for anything, the mama who thought he was wonderful, exciting, brilliant and talented. Or in her terms, “the cat’s meow.”
That kind of time travel was not on her agenda. Instead, Mom came out as a Republican. She had worked on Dad’s campaign for president of