How to Cook Your Daughter (19 page)

Now that my father had vacated the loft, Jesse became part of our household. As if to make a point of it, I locked the fire escape door once and for all. It wasn't much of a sacrifice. I never needed to sneak out anymore, anyway. I just told Mom where I was going and that was that. Still, things were hardly perfect. I kept secrets from Jesse, even though I loved him, and he never knew about my bulimia, which I took great pains to hide. It wasn't until a year or two into our relationship that I told him what my father had done. It was one thing to tell my girlfriends, but telling a guy…that was much
more difficult. My on-again, off-again shame about sex and desire were incredibly confusing to Jesse. To him, sex was nothing less than everything. He wrote me X-rated love letters that I found thrilling—and unreadable. It amazed me that everyone felt so relaxed about the one thing that made my stomach tighten—sex. Even my father, after what he had done, seemed to carry no shame. It wasn't that I didn't enjoy sex in the moment. With Jesse, I did. But the enjoyment only intensified my guilt. If I enjoyed sex, did that mean that maybe I had wanted what had happened with my father? That maybe it
had
been my fault?

One night my dad and I arranged to meet at the loft (he still had the key). We could talk, and he could pick up some of his things. My mother purposefully went out for the evening. I stayed home and waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, Jesse called from a pay phone outside a bar. Would I come meet him? I had been waiting for my dad for more than two hours. Time meant nothing to him. His schedule, whatever it was, reigned supreme. So I walked down to the Holiday on St. Mark's Place and had a drink with Jesse and two other friends, a cockney kid named “Scrapper” and another guy named Mark.

When I got back to the loft a few hours later, I gasped. We'd been robbed. The potted plants had been thrown on the floor. Dirt was everywhere. Two standing lamps were in pieces, and shards of glass stood in the living room rug. Dishes had been torn from the cupboards and papers strewn around.

Then I found the note. The person who had ransacked the place was my father, and he had left his calling card on a piece of cardboard that he'd set in the middle of the rubble:

I SPRINTED DOWN THE STEEP WOODEN ESCALATOR OF
London's Kings Cross station, certain I was going to miss the train that would take me to the North of England—to a Christmas weekend at the home of my aunt Celia. My father was coming from New York and would be there with Carla and my baby half brother.

Eight years had passed since Daddy told me that I stunk, and I had no hard evidence that he felt much different today. I can't say that I disagreed with him, either. I considered myself a failure, consumed by my problems, and angry that I gave them so much control of my life. But I couldn't see a way out.

I was living in Jesse's parents' house in Hampstead. He and I had long broken up, but I remained quite close to his mother. Jesse was in New York, and I was poor, so I had taken up the offer of a room while I finished my second year at Central School of Speech and Drama. In fact, I had another love, a Spanish painter named Pablo, whom I had met in New York but who now was back in Spain.

We had been together for almost five years, often in different
countries, but we were young and full of self-important enthusiasm for our “art.” Pablo and I had frequent debates over which was more important: our romance or his painting and my acting. I might have chosen marriage, but long-term commitments made Pablo nervous. Soon after I reached England, he returned to Madrid. He said he was having a crisis in his work that could only be solved by going back to Spain. Then to Paris for a while. Then to Russia. Now, he was considering a trip to Chile. Even small commitments worried him. When we ate out together, he would agonize over what to order, turning pale and stammering at the waiter's unavoidably direct question: “And what would you like sir?” That was Pablo, a smart, talented guy who had a chronic inability to make up his mind. Of course, who was I to judge?

Here I was, running for a train I half-hoped I wouldn't catch. It had been awhile since I had seen my dad—about a year—and I had hoped the time away might heal all wounds. Instead, it had made them hurt even more. I not only couldn't forget what had happened with Daddy that night in New Jersey, but as I grew older, the memories had become overwhelming. I couldn't concentrate in some of my classes—particularly voice classes, when we were told to lie on the floor and breathe. Each time I closed my eyes, I saw my room in that majestic old house, my bunk bed, and my father's silhouette. But how could I bring it up with him after all these years? And why? I had lived with my memories since I was seven. Why bring them up now, just because they were haunting me?

I made the train and convinced myself that it would be better this way.
Enduring my father would be better than listening to him rant about my failure to show up for Christmas.

I found a seat next to a British businessman. His blandness ap
pealed to me. I wouldn't mind some blandness in my life. Whether it was a Spanish painter or a middle-aged man in a Marks & Spencer shirt, I was always looking for someone to save me. From what? Myself, I assumed. I pulled out my copy of
Look Back in Anger
, which I was supposed to be studying for a scene we'd do in class. But the play lay in my lap as I stared out the window, wondering as I did every day if I might ever feel in control of my life, of myself. When I might start keeping the daily resolutions I had made for the last ten years. When I would finally stop bingeing and purging. I had made and broken so many resolutions that, at twenty-four, I felt exhausted.

My turmoil seemed so out of place in the serene countryside outside, the villages and soft English hills. I remembered how George Orwell described the same terrain when he was coming home from the Spanish Civil War in
Homage to Catalonia
—“all sleeping the deep, deep, sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.” Now I yearned for that sleep, or something like it, if only to escape the inescapable past.

The house where Celia lived with her husband and two young boys sat on the outskirts of the town of Newark. I couldn't get over the name and how little this northern English red brick town shared with its American namesake. Newark was full of Victorian buildings surrounded by flat, misty, deep green countryside. The house itself was ancient, long and vast with a curved, red shingle roof, with parts of it from the sixteenth century and “recent” additions from the eighteenth and nineteenth. I stood outside with my aunt and uncle, hesitant to enter. Already I could hear my father's voice from the sitting room. I couldn't make out exactly what he was saying, but by the tone of his voice and the rhythm of his words, I knew he was telling a story that no
doubt had engaged the small audience of relatives. At just the right moment, he would pause to puff on the long cigar I was sure he was smoking. Then he'd slowly exhale, making his listeners wait for the punch line, just as he had done with us growing up, just as he had done that night he told me he was leaving my mother.

“Come in, Jessie. It's freezing out there.” My aunt took my hand. Celia was an intelligent, understated woman with a quiet sense of humor. I liked her. Besides the faint aroma of cigars, the house smelled like tea and toast with a hint of pine, the scent of the season. I followed my aunt into the sitting room, where my father perched on the sofa. I hadn't seen him in months, but he looked the same. His hair was perhaps a bit shorter, his face a little puffier. But the big eyes were as prominent and intense as ever.

“Treasure, it's great to see you.” He stood and gave me a kiss. Carla peeled the baby off the Christmas tree and brought him over.

“Hi, how are you, Jessie? This is Nick.”

He was a strapping boy, and the chubby red cheeks and blond hair showed he hadn't inherited Carla's dark Italian looks. His blue eyes belonged to my father, just as mine did. And my dad gazed at him with paternal pride radiating from every pore.

“He looks a lot like you when you were a baby, Jessie.”

I felt awkward. My cheeks grew hot, and I hid them by leaning down and giving the baby a kiss on the forehead. He smelled of baby powder and shampoo.

That night I lay awake for a long time listening to the voices from downstairs, my father's clearer and more distinct than the rest. It was cold in the room, and I pulled my nightshirt up over my chin, a habit that I had inherited from my mother. I remembered a photograph my
dad took of her years ago, asleep with the sheet up to her mouth and clenched tightly between her teeth. I was her child too, and that gave me some solace.

The next day was one of preparation, of baking pies and Yorkshire puddings, of decorating. I tried to ignore how uncomfortable I felt there, chatting with Carla, my aunt, my uncle, and my grandmother. I played with Nick. Then I helped set the table for dinner. But when we sat down that night, something in me snapped. As Celia's husband began carving the roast, I looked across the table. There Daddy sat, hungry, eager. Suddenly, the strong, strange taste in my mouth, that taste that made me gag when I wasn't yet seven, came rising up fast, as if everything that had happened that night had happened just seconds ago. I tried to stop them, but tears filled my eyes and fell onto the red, holiday tablecloth. Everyone turned from the roast and toward me.

“I'm sorry. Excuse me. I'm sorry….” I rushed from the dining room and up the stairs. Just in time I made it to one of the bathrooms, lifted the lid of an antique white porcelain toilet and vomited. The irony of what had just happened did not escape me. I was a bulimic who spent much of her time trying to make herself vomit. Now, my body—simply because I had been sitting across from him—had done it on its own. My tears surprised me because they wouldn't stop. The taste of bile stayed in my mouth, and I felt cold. I reached up from the floor and pulled down a towel, which I wrapped tightly around me. I had to go back downstairs. Everyone was worried. But I gave myself a few more seconds. Finally, I stood and rummaged in the drawers for some toothpaste. I squeezed a blob and ran it over my teeth, then splashed water on my face, took off the towel, and hung it back where it had been. I did everything as slowly and deliberately as possible. But
it felt as though I were looking at myself from a great distance, as if I were watching myself in motion. When I went back into the hall, my father was climbing the stairs.

“What's wrong, Jessie? What is it?”

He seemed genuinely concerned, how he had sometimes looked when I was little and had fallen out of a tree or slid in the mud. Before I even realized the words were out of my mouth, I said, “How could you have done that, Daddy? That night in New Jersey. How could you have done that?”

He looked stricken, and his face flinched as if I had hit him. But he wasn't confounded. I knew he remembered. He remembered as well as I did.

“Jessie, I am sorry.”

I felt a huge weight begin to lift. Maybe there was hope that this could be resolved in some way. Perhaps it would get better.

“Treasure, this is not the time to talk. We will talk about it; I
want
to talk about it, but not here, not with everyone waiting downstairs and worrying about you. We'll talk tomorrow. Come to Mass with me in the morning, and on the way home, we'll talk. I promise.”

We'll talk!
I felt more elated than relieved. Finally, he would own up to it. I needed more than an apology. He had told me that before. I needed to know that I had done nothing to deserve it. That I hadn't asked for it. That the guilt I felt should be his, not mine. But we were going to talk!

He took my hand and led me down the stairs. Everyone at the table asked if I was all right, but they were much too embarrassed by my outburst to want to do anything other than ignore it. I would guess most of them chalked up my behavior to being an overly emotional American. This time, I sat next to my father, and he put his arm
around me.
We would talk,
I just kept reminding myself. I ate very little, for once not thinking about every bite. My dad ate a lot and drank even more, but that was nothing unusual. I went to bed anticipating the talk we were to have in the morning.

The next day dawned cold, with a gusty wind and a light rain. My dad barely said a word on the way to church, and I was too hesitant to bring up anything until he did. The brick church was rather ugly, and I could tell the service was not up to my father's standards. He hated any Catholic service that wasn't full of ritual and solemnity. I have always wondered if it was ritual that he craved from Catholicism more than a relationship with God.

He looked dark as we left Mass. Outside the wind was so fierce that we had to battle it. We trudged along the road that would take us back to my aunt's, and my father's continued silence troubled me. Finally, after a half a mile or so, he opened the subject.

“I know you want to talk about what you said last night.”

“Yes, Daddy, I do. It's really bothering me.”

“Well, first of all, my advice to you would be to stop picking at your wounds, Jessie. It's a bad habit to make other people responsible for your failures in life.”

My wounds? My failures? Mine?

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that you are sitting around picking at old scars, bringing up history, so you can make excuses for yourself. If you have problems, they are yours, not mine. Stop being so self-involved. Much worse things have happened to children.”

I stared at him, incredulous, as we walked on.
Where was he going with this? Where was the father who just yesterday said he was sorry?

“Think about the Holocaust, for fuck's sake,” he continued. “Babies being gassed to death. And in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge bayoneting six-year-olds in the rice paddies.”

The Holocaust? The Khmer Rouge? What did this have to do with what he had done?

“Stop being self-indulgent for a change. You're lucky to have the life you have. So think about that and stop blaming other people if you are a failure.”

I felt ambushed, unsteady. He had framed his argument masterfully. As always, he had left me little ground.

“I don't think I had it worse than children in the Holocaust. That's not what I'm talking about! I just want to get over this, so I don't have to think about it anymore.” My voice wavered.

“Well, if you
really
want to do that, stop opening up the same cut over and over again. Leave it alone and grow up. Life is not always what you want it to be. Think about that.”

Life is not always what you want it to be
…and that was true. It wasn't.
But I hadn't had a choice,
I thought.
Not when I was seven. Not when he crawled into bed with me. Not when he pushed my head down and told me what to do.

I said nothing for the rest of that long walk. I just thought about what he said. I had never compared my pain to that of others. And he was right. Others
had
suffered worse. But he was simply trying to evade the most important issue—taking responsibility for what he had done. And until he did that, until he took responsibility, I could never feel that what happened wasn't my fault. Until I stopped blaming myself, I couldn't stop being ashamed. He had used the night to craft his response. I suspect he was proud of what he came up with.

I headed back to London feeling worse than when I arrived at
Celia's. I hated myself, not only for what had happened with my dad, but also because I couldn't get over it. I felt weak and stupid, just as Dad told me I would. Bulimia took over my life. I loved school and acting, but there were days when I gave up, “bad” days when I would walk up to Hampstead High Street and buy pastries and chocolates. I took them home to my small room in a new flat I shared with some girlfriends, locked the door, and sat in bed eating and eating and eating. Then I would cry over the empty wrappers and bags until my regret pushed me into the bathroom to throw it all up.