Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [31]
With everyone else at college Mom and Dad waited for me to graduate from high school so they could sell the house and get divorced. I felt like I was a slow eater and the check had been paid and everyone had their coats on still sitting at the table, waiting for me to be finished.
Meanwhile, Mom planned.
AS SOON AS I graduated she would move into the city where she belonged. She was a city person, in case we didn’t realize this about her. She was unable to get by one more minute without Korean delis and takeout and gay colorists for confidantes. We didn’t know. Dad, during the in-house separation, was vulnerable, emotionally but also, obviously, financially. And I felt awful for him.
Mom stopped cooking for Dad. She would make dinner and then as we were eating, Dad would come in the kitchen and chat cheerfully as he always did, only he would be preparing some really disgusting dinner for himself. Olives and some chicken livers. This was what he could afford. We were eating salad, leg of lamb, while Dad was sautéing chicken livers and a hunk of bread. He ate chicken livers four out of five nights. It seemed to me the most depressing thing in the world that someone should be banished from the family meal, made to eat something different, something inferior. Dad was helpless in the kitchen. He had no money, no cooking skills, no ideas about what to eat, really. There was no staff in the kitchen to prepare him a plate where he could sit and talk about working for the white man. He was fending for himself for probably the first time in his life. And I would rather not have watched.
My mother seemed like Idi Amin eating her lamb in front of my father. Had she not studied the Geneva Convention? They were at war, yes, but there were rules. Food is life, theoretically, so if you stop cooking for someone, are you trying to kill them? It seemed to me this is precisely what she was trying to do.
ONE MORNING DAD ASKED me how to use the washing machine and I didn’t know so we tried to figure it out together when Mom came in and said she was putting the house on the market.
She had a prescient relationship with real estate well before people made livings as house flippers or devoured TV shows about making a killing selling a house. She just had a sense, which she had worked a few times in St. Louis before we moved to New York. She was like Columbo, being driven around in some real estate agent’s Cadillac.
“You want to buy the worst house on the best street,” she’d say, chopping cucumbers in the kitchen. She prided herself on the fact that she had found our house, a house that was in her mind a piece of crap but one that was way up in value. When she sold it she really got into the fact that she had made so much money on it, like she had hoodwinked some suckers into paying through the nose for an illusion, for her illusion, one that she had birthed and paid for with her own money, suffered for, and was now unloading. She was “staging” before there was a word for it. I came home one day with my boyfriend, Martin, to find her tinkering with her mise-en-scène.
“Martin, Jeanne. I need you to sit in the living room.”
“But we were going to watch The Edge of Night upstairs in Julia’s room.”
“Well, I need you to put a decent shirt on and grab a book, Dickens or better yet, Jane Eyre, and sit in front of the fire on the living room floor.”
“Fire? It’s seventy-two outside.”
“Do as I say!” she snapped, and then went into the kitchen to put a gizmo in the oven that emits the smell of baking apple pie throughout your house.
We changed our shirts quickly and got in front of the fire and pretended to be reading on the carpet while strangers came through our house and looked into closets and asked about property taxes. She sold our house for five times what she bought it for, in just under four hours.
My graduation, the thing that my parents were waiting for, was almost upon us, but