Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [7]
“Scram! All of you!” Julia would scream at the window, and we’d run off in case she’d called the police on us. Then we’d switch roles.
When we got bored with The Weinhausers we began talking about going to bars. Not necessarily because we wanted to drink or meet men, just because it seemed like the next logical thing to do. And not just any bar, we wanted desperately to go to Stephen Talkhouse. Stephen Talkhouse was a local bar; sometimes there was music but mostly just regulars having drinks and finding someone on the Island to have sex with who they hadn’t already screwed fourteen times. Elise’s older sister Sasha said we were too young to go to Stephen Talkhouse but she would take us next year, when we were nine and ten.
DAD’S NOVEL DIDN’T SELL. It was rejected by two publishers, and that was that. Dad later said, “I didn’t even think of rewriting it. Rewriting was not playing the game like a gentleman.”
In January, Nonnie died. My father gathered us on the long couch in the barn’s high-ceilinged living room.
“Nonnie died. In Florida. Neallie is with her,” my father said.
“Neallie died, too?” Eleanor asked.
“No, I mean Neallie is with Nonnie right now so she’s not alone.”
“But Nonnie’s dead, so that means Neallie is alone.” Katharine, future copy editor, said.
“Neallie is fine. And Mama’s going to be fine, she’s just very sad. We’ll let her be alone for a while so she can call Aunt Ruth and Aunt Carol.”
Mom cried for at least a whole day and a half, which was really terrifying for us girls. A couple days later we all went to St. Louis for the funeral at Annunziata. Mom was a disaster. At Nonnie’s funeral Mom tried to get in the casket with Nonnie. We stayed at Nonnie’s house for a week and then we all went back to Stony Hill Farm except my mother, who stayed behind to settle Nonnie’s estate.
Nonnie’s will apparently had a little twist: My mother would get Nonnie’s house only if she moved all of us back to St. Louis and lived in it. She would not be allowed to sell it.
My grandmother loved puzzles, really any kind accompanied by a big bowl of salty potato chips would do, especially brainteasers and card games. She liked any kind of action. When my sisters and I would get out the Monopoly board, my grandmother would get her German on and get out her long ironing board and iron the money before the game could officially begin. My mother inherited her mother’s love of puzzles in the form of crosswords, and Nonnie’s turned out to be the Sunday New York Times of wills. Mom was furious that some of her inheritance was contingent upon moving back to St. Louis, but it probably also felt like rejoining the workforce. As a retired child equestrian she hadn’t competed in years, but she honed her brain-twisting skills daily, at the kitchen table, with a pencil and an iced coffee.
Over the next six months Mom was going back and forth to St. Louis, eventually managing to get around a very tight legal document to sell Nonnie’s house and get the rest of her inheritance as well. We were back in shoes and hollandaise sauce, but how this all went down we didn’t know. Mom was an awfully swell-looking lady: doors didn’t so much open for her as they did fall off the hinges. She returned to Long Island in Nonnie’s fur coat, Nonnie’s big blue Oldsmobile Regency. She was happy to have been able to crack at least the house clause of the Germanic will but she was also profoundly changed. Maybe it was guilt that she left her mother and then she died while we were away or a feeling that we had left her mother for a book that didn’t even sell. But something besides my grandmother’s life had ended for my mom, some playfulness, a lightness.
Mom and Dad were becoming increasingly uncomfortable with bohemian rural life; in those days no one lived out in the Hamptons during the winter if their ancestors weren’t born there. No one from St. Louis came to visit Long Island in February, Elise’s family stopped coming after Thanksgiving, everyone stopped coming out to Long Island after Thanksgiving.
The barn was drafty, the nearest hospital