Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [46]
After living with Dad for twenty-three years, my mother certainly wasn’t going to jump for joy that I wanted to write; my sisters didn’t care, as long as I didn’t TALK about writing.
I had always had my heart set on doing nothing, but playwriting came along and I thought, Why not? I’d like to take a few precautions not to go insane and die broke, chatting with wallpaper like my grandmother did and whatnot, but other than that, could it be so bad? When Dad found out that I was doing some playwriting and poetry and short stories he called me at my mother’s apartment one weekend and said he was driving to Rye to a dinner party and “why don’t I give you a ride back to Purchase and we’ll talk about whether you should try and get a job at a small paper somewhere, à la Hemingway, it’s the best way to get used to writing every day.”
I accepted the ride back to school. I spotted his little red Dodge Omni coming toward me up York Avenue and saw there were other people in the car. I hopped in and was introduced to some (“very interesting gal, hell of a nice guy, used to write for The Nation . . . ”) people. I don’t know why I thought there wouldn’t be a couple of “terrific-looking” Austrian novelists in the car with my dad. It started to rain right around the curve of the Willis Avenue Bridge but Dad remained focused on something he was saying rather than something he was driving. I barely noticed but the Austrian in the backseat with me was clearly terrified. It was a stormy, curvy, windows-up, oxygen-deprived, harrowing monologue of a ride with no say whatsoever in your own safety or wellbeing or the topic of conversation so yeah, I was utterly at home. They dropped me off and drove off in the storm.
The next day my mother called. “I suppose you’ve heard what happened with your father.”
“No.”
“Apparently after he dropped you off he drove down some stairs and couldn’t get back up the stairs. I’m not sure. There were some Austrian writers who were coming out of the library. Sounds like the blind leading the blind, if you ask me.”
“The Austrians were in the car. What steps?” I realized the only steps my mother could be talking about were the library steps. My father had driven down this long set of stairs that is not wide, really, just a regular person staircase, not like the steps up the Jefferson Memorial or anything, and he would have had to have driven from my apartment onto the mall, a brick esplanade kind of thing meant, again, for pedestrians to get around, not cars. I had never seen a car on the mall ever. So he drove onto the mall like someone in a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, and then went down this narrow staircase where he landed in front of the library. Again, a place where cars didn’t go because there was no way for them to get there. I called him up.
“God damn it, Jean-Joe, I know it’s a state school and all, but do you think they might have a little something in the budget for a few signs here and there?”
“Signs? Dad, there’s a road and then the road ends. What kind of sign do you want?”
“Well, I’ll tell ya, some damn nice kids helped me push my car back up those stairs but it must’ve made the Austrians a little nervous. They took the train back to the city, which I thought was a little unnecessary.”
I wasn’t looking forward to hearing around campus about the lunatic who had driven down the library steps, but at the same time I was glad to have avoided a conversation with him about writing. The last time we’d talked I’d told him I might major in African-American literature, and his reaction was calm, measured, as if trying to get me to move a knife away from my own throat.
“Now, Jeanne, hold on a minute, hold on here. I can see your attraction, particularly to James Baldwin and so forth, there’s no doubt Maya Angelou is terrific,