Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [9]
We got a new dog, a Kerry blue terrier we named Guinness. This dog was supposed to be our new civilized dog, unlike Jubjub, our last dog in Amagansett and all the other criminally insane dogs we had owned who “had to go.” Dogs would disappear one day and you’d ask, “Where’s Jubjub?” and my mom would just say, “Oh, he had to go,” as if he had a dentist appointment in midtown.
But Guinness was unrepentantly vicious. He scratched, bit, jumped on people, leaving trails of raised white flesh down your thighs. He murdered our bird, Oiseau. Neighborhood kids left our house looking like they’d been jumped—crying, with rips in their clothing, scratches on their legs and arms. When we had Mrs. Spaeth over to our new house for the first time, we were sitting in the living room having cocktails, trying to look presentable to the elderly art patron, when Guinness came into the room, his teeth gripping a used maxi pad he had dug out of the bathroom garbage. He sat on the white carpet next to Mrs. Spaeth gnawing on his bloody chew toy, until my dad managed to get it out of his mouth and hand it to my mother as Eloise talked about the Calder exhibit at the 1952 Venice Biennale.
In Bronxille we became devout twice-a-year Catholics, Christmas and Easter. My mother and father were tanked at every midnight mass and we were always late and my mother toddled into St. Joseph’s Church in town in Nonnie’s mink coat and demanded to sit in the front pew as if we were at a Broadway show. I don’t think I once connected with a sermon. Who were those creepy bachelors who collected the baskets during mass? Did they have to look so sad while they took your money? I did love the “Peace be with you” part of mass, reaching out and shaking hands with people you didn’t know, touching strangers and wishing them well. Shaking hands with that trembly old lady with the furry chin like a kiwi whose hands felt like little earthquakes. That was nice. Mom and Dad were too disorganized for more regular worship. There was never any talk of God or faith—odd, considering they had both gone to Catholic schools through college. As she smoked and read the paper in bed, Mom bragged about being certified to teach catechism, but when I came home one day and said, “I don’t think I believe God is real,” she just said, “All right, sweet pea. Let’s see what Half Pint is up to, shall we?” and we snuck a Little House on the Prairie rerun before Dad came home. It seemed as if everything they once valued, everything important, we had given up. St. Louis, our hometown, gone. The Catholic Church, an awful lot of effort. Family, no extended family around at all. On Long Island we had been untethered, but we’d had a deadline, for the book, of one year, and then we were going back to all the things we had known. Now there was no going back to who we had been. We were all trying out new ideas of who or what we were going to be in Westchester.
I was the baby.
One mile from home in Jelly-bean town,
Lives Jeanne, the Jelly-bean Queen.
She loves her dice and treats ’em nice;
No dice would treat her mean.
Her Jelly Roll can twist your soul
Her eyes are big and brown,
She’s the Queen of the Queens of the Jelly-beans—
My Jeanne of Jelly-bean Town.
Dad would often say-sing this bit from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “The Jelly-Bean” as he tucked me in at night, past the age when others had been tucked in, for which I took a lot of shit from my sisters. They thought it was babyish to still be tucked in at ten years old and it was, but this is when I got his full attention and stories of his childhood in St. Louis.
For a long time I thought Dad had written “The Jelly-Bean” about me. He was a writer. My name was Jeanne. The name in the poem was spelled how I spelled Jeanne, the French spelling of Jean (pronounced Jeannie), so it must have been written by Dad for me. I never questioned the brown eyes in it and the fact that mine are blue. “The Jelly-Bean,” not that I understood a word of it at the time, is about Jim Powell, a jelly bean, a southern term for