How to Cook Your Daughter (12 page)

Olga sometimes sent us off to the supermarket next to the apartment to do her grocery shopping. Usually we enjoyed it because we could sneak some treats for ourselves. But one afternoon, we saw to our horror that Olga had written “Tampax” on her grocery list. Krisztina and I were maybe twelve at the time—it never bothered us to get Olga's cigarettes, something we could get away with in 1977. But tampons! It was crucial that no one in the supermarket see us get them. Or if they did, that everyone knew that the Tampax wasn't for either of us. First we had to scope the aisles. We weren't exactly sure where the tampons might be, and we certainly weren't going to ask. We found them, not surprisingly, in the toiletries aisle, under the alarming heading of “Feminine Protection.”
Protection against what?
I wondered.

The brand Olga wanted sat high up on the shelf, and bringing home the wrong ones just wasn't an option. Olga would have taken one look at them and sent us right back to the supermarket to exchange them, a thought even more mortifying than fetching the Tampax. But how to get the Tampax down…. Clearly we weren't going to ask one of the young male supermarket clerks for help. Krisztina's
solution: I give her a leg up. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Krisztina was a bit heavier than me, but she also was braver. Much braver. I looked up and down the aisle. Empty. And so I made a step with my hands and hoisted her up.

Everything seemed fine—for a moment. But just as she reached for the box of Tampax, my hands slipped. With a cry that rang through the supermarket, Krisztina grabbed the shelf for support—and in the process, brought every box of tampons (along with a few packets of Over Night Pads, Light Days Pads, and even a box or two of douches) tumbling down with her to the yellow linoleum floor. Not just one but five young male clerks came running to see if we were okay. As one of them helped Krisztina up, I gathered my wits and said, as loudly as I could: “I wish your
mother
had never asked us to get
her
things for her!”

With the “things” buried under the milk in our shopping cart, we squirmed out of the chaos we had created in the toiletries section as fast as possible and made our way to the checkout. Despite—or maybe because of—the ruckus, we still weren't particularly comfortable with our selections. So we waited an extra ten or fifteen minutes until a female checker came on duty.

Others noticed my body was changing. One of my father's friends, a man I had known most of my life, called the loft one night. He must've been pretty messed up. “Jessie, hey, what are you wearing?” he asked me out of the blue. I jokingly told my father about it, and he flew into a rage. But then when Dad and I would go somewhere together, he'd make jokes about me being his “girlfriend.” I became more and more self-conscious and started worrying about my weight. I thought if I stayed thin I could fend off puberty. I took to sneaking onto the scale in the kitchen and weighing myself. And I wasn't alone in doing so.
My sister was weighing herself; my father was weighing himself. Only my mother wasn't obsessed with her weight.

A few years later, I understood just how tormented my sister felt. In an open letter to the family, Kathy seemed to echo my feelings:

I suspect some at the
Lampoon
had grown just as tired of it. The magazine as it was when my father started there in 1971 had all but vanished. Michael O'Donoghue had gone to
Saturday Night Live
. Henry Beard and Doug Kenny sold their share of the magazine in 1975. And now, in 1978, my father was losing the magazine to his nemesis, P. J. O'Rourke. The
Lampoon
was moving in a direction that rankled Dad. He never was a big fan of the teenage-sex-and-gross-out jokes that made
Animal House
such a big hit. His humor was more biting, more wicked, more dark. The publisher, Matty Simmons, and P. J. felt that the new brand of humor would sell the magazine, just as it sold
Animal House
. I woke up to more and more violent and curse-filled rounds with the punching bag, and when I got out of bed, Daddy would tell me in between punches that the bag was either P. J. or Matty, depending on who was aggravating him that week. With my
dad, more frustration meant more drinking and drugs. His cravings flared when he felt good but also when he felt down. Sadly, staying steady seemed almost impossible for him—and by extension, for all of us too. He took to coming home later and less often and doing more coke than ever. When he was home, the drugs were apparent. Even when we were in New Jersey, they followed us. My father had one or two friends with whom getting high seemed to be his only connection. One guy, supposedly an English nobleman who had fallen on hard times and now lived with his junkie girlfriend on the Lower East Side, we called Lord Michael. He stood small and balding, wore a large gold ring, and walked with a cane, but only for pretense. I knew he always carried a lot of drugs, and for that reason—knowing what they did to my dad—I didn't like him. Even so, he used to come out to New Jersey with us regularly. I remember one morning when Kathy and I set off for a horseback riding lesson on our bikes, leaving my father and Lord Michael chopping up a black block of raw hash with kitchen knifes in preparation for the evening's entertainment.

Kathy and I had taken different approaches to escaping the loft and the craziness my father brought home. For me, it was hanging out with Krisztina. For Kathy, it was school work and horseback riding, an endeavor that seemed to rile Dad. He told Kathy she looked like the “She-Wolf of Dachau” in her high boots and jodhpurs. And he added, as if for emphasis and with a sarcasm so dry that it cracked, “I left England to get away from people like you.” But Kathy managed to tune him out or so it seemed. She graduated from Village Community School (VCS) and went on to the best public high school in New York: Stuyvesant. I continued at VCS for another year and managed to get into the second-best public high school in New York, Bronx Science. But something happened to me during the summer in between.

I started a diary when I was twelve, and one of my first entries seems telling: “TONY HENDRA IS NOT GOD!!!” I wrote it in huge letters across the page, but the meaning was even bigger. When my dad used to tell me that some song I liked was stupid or that the book I was reading was trash, I accepted his views as the unquestionable truth. Now, I was beginning to wonder if my father really was right all the time. It had finally dawned on me: this man who happened to be my father had dominated my life, had manipulated me in ways that suited him, had broken me down without ever building me up. I had always assumed that my father's words were gospel, that his opinions should be my opinions; he delivered them so forcefully. But suddenly, on the eve of my thirteenth birthday, it was as if a thunderbolt had struck. Maybe Krisztina had emboldened me. Maybe I finally began to understand what he had done to me and how truly wrong it was. But writing those words were my first real rebellion against my dad. After that moment, my attitude toward everything changed. I graduated from being a shy, awkward, and diligent girl to a troubled, angry teen.

Krisztina joined me there, and we started looking for ways to piss off our parents, particularly my father and her mother. The punk world of the late 1970s and early 1980s fit the bill perfectly. It embodied a tremendous amount of angry energy that was expressed in the way people dressed, wore their hair, and played music. Like a lot of kids in New York in 1979, our first exposure to this underground culture was the ritual of going to
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
. On Friday nights, the Eighth Street Playhouse filled with teenagers dressed as characters from the movie. Krisztina and I could barely hear the dialogue; everyone in the audience was screaming out each word. Walking home down Bleecker Street, we smoked clove cigarettes and
decided in our snotty Manhattan way that the crowd had been “way too bridge and tunnel” (“bridge” meaning Brooklyn kids who had come across the Brooklyn or Manhattan Bridge, and “tunnel” meaning the Jersey crowd who came through the Lincoln or Holland Tunnel). For us, New York was divided into the chosen, those with a 212 area code, and those destined to spend eternity in one of the four other boroughs. We decided to head east in search of a better scene.

The first night that Krisztina and I ventured out to see a local band at CBGB night club on the Bowery, we spent hours preparing. We chose my house because Olga would have had a fit seeing us dressing as we did. My mother made no effort to dissuade us. But she demanded that we turn down the blaring Sex Pistols, “God Save the Queen,” and “Anarchy in the UK.” Then she fled altogether on the pretext of “some errands.” After she'd left, I asked Krisztina to cut my hair. She had already cut her own in a short, slightly uneven bob. My hair was long, blond, and shiny—much too healthy and feminine-looking for a night at CBGB. We moved to the kitchen so the hair could be swept up more easily, and Krisztina began the job with a pair of large scissors. Then I noticed it—one of my father's carving knifes on the counter.

“Cut it with that knife, Krisztina!”

“With a knife?”

“Yeah, just pick it up and cut it all off, just chop through it. It will look so punk!”

Krisztina grabbed the knife and began her mission. It wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. Krisztina had to saw through my hair a handful at a time, and the choppings fell around me in long, uneven clumps. That left short, jagged clumps sticking from my scalp. It looked unbelievably bad, like a lawn mower had run amuck on my head, but we were much too pumped to admit our stupidity. The next
step: to dye the mess platinum blond with some dye we had shoplifted from the drug store down the street. Krisztina's new shade was “midnight black.” We left the dye on my hair so long that it became slightly green. All the better!

We pulled on black ski pants and ripped T-shirts, and Krisztina had on a bright blue, tattered coat that looked more like a rug. Our wardrobes had come from a hole-in-the-wall thrift store on First Avenue, where the clothes had been dumped in a huge pile that filled the place from floor to ceiling. To find what you wanted, you had to stand in the pile and dig. The woman who owned the place seemed thrilled to make a buck for stuff she probably got off the street anyway.

The final steps: thick streaks of black eyeliner, cheap bright red lipstick, and safety pins. It seemed much too tame to put the safety pins in the earring holes Krisztina and I had gotten for our eleventh birthdays. So she suggested that we should stick the safety pins all the way up our ears. We took the precaution of “sterilizing” the pins by holding a lit match to the sharp point and wiping some vodka on them. Then we took turns shoving four or five safety pins directly into our ear lobes and up toward the top. The top ones were harder and more painful, the cartilage there being so much thicker, but we carried on anyway, wincing and crying but not giving up until we both had rows of slightly bloody safety pins all the way up our tattered ears. Just as we finished, my mother came home. She screamed when she saw me.

“Jessie, what have you done to your hair!” She was close to tears over what remained of my once-enviable mop and furious with the both of us. We took it as affirmation. I had managed to upset even my stoic mother.

At 9:00
P.M
., Krisztina and I went to pick up our friend Iana from her loft on Seventeenth Street. Iana's parents were Bulgarian, and like
Krisztina's, had left their country because of the Russian occupation. In their case, they hadn't fled but were exiled for antigovernment activities. Her dad was an artist, a wonderfully eccentric man who was always up to some project or other—going to Kenya and casting sleeping elephants in plaster or blowing up sculptures in a project called “The Big Bang.” Her mother was elegant, sophisticated, and unusual in a more quiet way than her husband. Neither of Iana's parents said a word about how Krisztina and I looked. Her father simply smiled his squinty, mischievous smile, and her mother bid us a polite good evening in her strongly accented English. She did add something in Bulgarian to Iana, which might just as easily have been “God, those two look absolutely dreadful!” as “Don't come home too late, sweetie.” But we had no idea which, and Iana wasn't telling. We envied Iana, if only for her parents. They let her do exactly as she wanted, and if she came in at four in the morning, they never said a word.

Iana herself was petite and pretty with long, wavy, brown hair and brown eyes. She had also put on black ski pants and eyeliner, but she had preserved her hair, and she wore tiny, pearl earrings, not safety pins. Her lipstick was Clinique. Iana always knew where to draw the fashion line and had enough self-respect not to do any permanent, or at least semipermanent, damage to herself. She exuded an icy self-confidence that left everyone who knew her in a sort of cowed awe.

Krisztina and I hoped we were shocking everyone we passed as we walked down Broadway and then over to the Bowery to CBGB. We tried desperately to look older than our fourteen years and to impress with our scowls. But it's hard to impress New Yorkers, and I'm sure most of them saw us for what we were—two young, insecure girls who were trying too hard. Iana knew she didn't have to look shocking to make an impression. She carried herself with her usual sophistication.