Vacation

2016

Somehow, my father had the goods on everybody.

Within an instant of introduction, he could beam his laser-like insight into you and send every atom of self doubt whirling. He made even grown men cry.

You might say I sound proud of this. I don’t mean to, but as both observer and recipient of said talent, I have to admire it for its consistency and precision.

It was the Sixties, a time so hopelessly fashionable and contemporary that it was fated to be a joke, its anthems now the background for car commercials, its rock icons the subjects of Vegas tribute bands and cheap T shirts. Who chokes on their own vomit anymore?

My dad was a novelist, one of those womanizing, hard drinking, morbidly depressed writers of the World War II generation. Unlike some others of that group, he never engaged in fist fights. Like a boxer’s hands, words for him were lethal weapons that should have been restricted by law. Calmly, articulately, never raising his voice, he simply destroyed the connective tissue of your psyche while you sat there, stupefied, wondering what the hell had just happened to you.

Alcohol induced verbal altercations frequently erupted at social events. It was the kind of sarcastic brawling that’s fun to read about but the height of humiliation if your dad is the perpetrator and you have to quickly grab your belongings and skulk out of your host’s house, hoping the guests wouldn’t notice you’d been there at all.

I grew up in New York City in the 1960’s. Everyone in our social circle was smart, accomplished and eccentric, and I was expected to be the same. I was considered bright, but I hated school and turned truancy into an Olympic event.

This made my father alternately proud and furious. On the one hand, he felt that most schools were little more than correctional institutions run by stupefied bureaucrats, where the teachers had the intellect of a truffle-routing pig. The real world was where you got your education. He had street cred on this philosophy, having quit school at 12 and become a success nonetheless.

On the other hand, he was weary of the phone calls and letters from frustrated school administrators about my notable absences. It didn’t help matters when he would come to my parent/teacher conferences and say things like, “Why are you wasting my daughter’s time with math? She’s going to be a writer.”

There was enough insanity in my parents’ marriage to keep my rebellion off the radar. It was as though two people had been created for the sole purpose of tormenting each other. Their fights were legendary, almost operatic. There was little actual physical violence, except for the occasional shoving and slaps in the face. The true terror came from the threats:

“I’ll spit in your face!”

“Then you’ll be lying on the floor with your teeth smashed out!”

“You’re insane! You’re a vicious drunk!”

“When I first saw you, I thought you were the homeliest, most low class woman I’d ever seen!”

Oddly, they never considered their audience. My little sister and I would huddle in our rooms, she crying, me sick but attempting to calm her. In my pathetic universe of magical thinking, I imagined that if I heard every venomous syllable, I could somehow control the tsunami. I was forever alert, attuned to any signs of an impending disaster. It was so bad that, even if I were home deadly sick, I would refuse to fall asleep.

Generally, these melodramas would end with my father storming out of the house, often saying that he was going to jump off the George Washington Bridge. We sometimes wouldn’t hear from him for days, leaving us incarcerated in dread.

The “George Washington Bridge” was generally a euphemism for whatever literary groupie he had on the side. My dad was not only brilliant, he was beautiful, really incredible, in a vulnerable, European movie star way. Years later, I took a photo of us, me as a toddler, him behind me protectively, to a photo shop to be restored. The fifty-ish lady behind the counter practically passed out. “Oh, who is that handsome man! Oh, he looks like quite the rake!” Get in line, lady, I thought. And bring a chair and a sandwich-it’s going to be a while.

My mother discovered his compulsive infidelities and often knew who they were. She stopped calling hospitals and the morgue and began to call his girlfriends, asking if they would convey the message that his family might like to see him. Sometimes they were brazen enough to call our apartment (he was clearly brazen enough to give them the number). One night, he and I answered at the same time, he a moment sooner, so he didn’t know I was on the other line. “I told you never to call me here.” (Well, we might have been listed in the phone book , perhaps I don’t give him enough credit.) “Oh, if I thought anyone were listening, I would hang up”, said anonymous homewrecker.

I thought of saying, You’d better hang up now, but decided to let it go, mainly out of fear of the rage to which I might be subjected. I’d resigned myself at that point to the knowledge that dad was a compulsive philanderer who flaunted his transgressions.

More banshee outbursts from my mother erupted because of this. Still, she kept him around, despite knowing how public her humiliation was. They were locked in this game, each feeding the other, until emotional satiation finally wore them out.

Despite this, I loved my father; we were closer to each other than to anyone in the world. This, too, enraged my mother, who saw me as another rival competing for her husband’s attentions. This did not result in a loving, trusting, mother/daughter bond. I was my father’s child, my sister was my mother’s, and the battle lines were drawn, with no demilitarized zone. Sibling closeness was seen as betrayal and discouraged at all costs. We were the North and South Korea of the Upper West Side.

When dad was out on his sexual forays, or had moved into yet another skuzzy apartment to get away from it all, I became his surrogate of verbal abuse. My mother was a holocaust of jealousy and resentment, and she was happy to consume me if the object of her anger wasn’t there. If you’re not near the one you hate, hate the one you’re near.

“You’re a sneak and a liar, just like your father!”

This remark came out of the many illnesses I faked at school so I could rush home to make sure my parents weren’t murdering each other. It was the only way to partially relieve my constant dread of existential annihilation at their hands.

“The next time you say you’re sick, I’m going to tell the school that you’re lying! Iris is a faker! Iris is a faker!”

I would rather have been punched in the face than hear this. My delusion of control was being snatched from me. I was a little social misfit, anyway, an object of ridicule among my peers. Later, when I was older, I would never miss an opportunity to be anywhere but a classroom.

In some ironic way of absolving themselves, my parents did what all good New York parents do, and sent me to a shrink when I was about eight. I told her about my recurrent nightmares involving large masses of water: a maniacal ocean, swallowing all around it into an infinite maw, a biblical rainstorm sucking humanity into a vortex. My therapist actually explained my family dynamic to me, since I’d pretty much discerned it myself, and basically told me I had to develop survival skills that would keep me from psychosis until I was old enough to move out.

My primary skill was to isolate myself and read. After school, I would go to the candy store, buy chocolate fudge, and head to the library, where I would read until it closed. I endured dinner, my parents’ bickering, and the start of my dad’s evening whiskey consumption, then quietly went to my room, hoping to become invisible, where I’d read more. In elementary school, I read all the Nancy Drew, Bobsey Twins and Hardy Boys series. My homework was another matter.

Somehow schoolwork just never presented itself to me in an acceptable way. Much wailing ensued from my teachers, about my “not reaching my potential” and “wasting my talents” and “being lazy and antisocial”. Threats, bargaining and confinement to my room didn’t change my behavior. Now and then, to get everyone off my back, I’d get some A’s, then sink back into peaceful underachievement. My fourth grade teacher was the only one who sympathized with me and let me go to the school library during the last hour of the day instead of suffering the whispering and giggling of my schoolmates.

Actually, fourth grade was a turning point for me. That’s when I learned to hate vacations. Idle time gave my parents’ resentments more time to fester; dad had more time to drink. The fake serenity was simply a cruel joke by the universe, a prelude to disaster.

We had rented a house in Connecticut, owned by a famous writer of all the history textbooks you had to read in high school. The house was in a rural, woodsy area, fairly deserted, a big yard with a pond in back. I cared about none of this. For me, relief came when I saw the floor to ceiling bookshelves in every room, some with books stacked double. There, I found an illustrated copy of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, an English translation of the grisly, unexpurgated Brothers Grimm, and every book Louisa May Alcott had ever written. I spent most of my time in the bedroom. “Why are we in the country if you won’t go outside?” my mother asked. I made the occasional appearance outdoors during daylight hours to keep her happy.

The emotional decay began fairly early. My mother would march around furiously, cigarette in hand, rage on her face. “I hate it here,” she said looking at me as though I had booked the trip. My chronic psychosomatic nausea was already brewing. The unnatural peace of our vacation home made it all the more ominous. No New York City cabs and sirens for background noise. The birdsongs, the smell of honeysuckle, the sweet breezes, were enchantments beckoning me to the gates of hell.

My dad and I sat on the porch later.”Mom hates it here,” I said.

“I know”, and that was our entire conversation. We didn’t need to talk; we just sat together in a sad communion. But I knew then I had made a terrible mistake.

A few hours later, my sister and I were playing outside, when we heard them. “Iris tells me you hate it here,” said my father.

“Oh, did she? It doesn’t surprise me, she runs and tells you everything.”

We stopped playing, drew closer to each other. My sister looked at me fearfully; I could only shake my head. The voices got louder, till my mother was screaming and he was yelling back, both of them shrieking accusations, threats, pronouncements of hate.

I don’t know how long it actually went on. We heard two thumps, and my sister began to cry. Had he hit her, knocked her down, killed her? Unable to stand it, we rushed upstairs.

My father stormed out of the room. My mother sat there sobbing. Dad had hurled two suitcases across the room and was now downstairs.

I ran down after him-I was his ally, after all. As I stood paralyzed, he ripped the telephone out of the wall. He picked up a dining room chair and smashed it to bits. Then he ran outside and jumped in the pond.

This insane act made me fall to the ground. I may have been crying, I don’t know, but I’d been reduced to something formless, pulsing with terror. Was he going to drown himself in front of me? Would he really make me watch his final abandonment?

My mother, composed now, came outside. “Thanks for telling him,” she whispered. “OK, Chandler, get out of the pond.”

“We’re leaving”, she said to me. The hurled suitcases were now packed and we loaded them in the car.

My father came out of the pond, and watched us. As we started to drive away, my mother said, “I forgot my wallet. It’s on the coffee table. Go and get it.”

“Why do I have to?” I asked. “Why can’t you do it yourself?”

“Just get it! He won’t get angry with you.”

I walked to the door, where my father still stood. I looked at him, knowing I was betraying him by leaving him here, in the middle of nowhere, with no car, and now, no phone. He gave me the wallet without a word and we left.

Three days later, he showed up at our house. “How the hell did you get here?” asked my mother.

He’d hitchhiked to a bus station, then taken a cab. “Look, I even tried to bump myself off”, he said, displaying some superficial marks on his wrist. “With a glass.” My mother shrugged; he went to their room to change. Things went back to the way they’d always been.