Lucky (5 page)

"All that doesn't matter," he said. "We just need the gist of it. As soon as you sign it, you can go home."

I did. I left for Pennsylvania with my mother.

Early that morning, once my mother had arrived at the dorm, I'd asked her if she had to tell Dad. By that time she already had. He was the first person she called. They debated in that phone call whether to tell my sister just then. She had one more final to take at Perm.

But my father needed to tell my sister as much as my mother needed to tell him. He called her in her dorm room in Philadelphia that morning as my mother and I made our way home. Mary would take her last exam knowing I had been raped.

And so, soon after, I began to come up with my theory of primary versus secondary. It was okay for primary people, my mother and father, my sister and Mary Alice, to share the story. They needed to, it was only natural. But the people they told, the secondary people, should not tell others. In this way, I thought I could contain the news of what had happened to me. I conveniently forgot all the faces in the dorm of those who had no vested interest in keeping faith with me.

I was returning home.

My life was over; my life had just begun.

Paoli, Pennsylvania, is an actual town. It has a center and a train line named after it, the Paoli Local. It was where I told people I was from. I wasn't. I was from Malvern. Or at least that was my mailing address. But actually I was from Frazer. I grew up in an amorphous valley of converted farmland that had been divided into treeless lots and sold off to developers. Our development, Spring Mill Farms, was one of the first to have been built in the area. For many years it was as if the fifteen or so original houses had landed in the midst of an ancient site of a meteor crash. There was nothing, save the equally new and treeless high school, for miles around. New families like mine moved into the two-story houses and bought sod or small, whirring seed spreaders that the fathers walked back and forth across the dirt lots as if they were the most disciplined of pets. Heartsick at her inability to grow anything resembling the lawns in magazines, my mother opened her arms wide to the advent of crabgrass. "To hell with it," she said. "At least it's green!"

The houses came in two options: garage sticking out in front, garage tucked to the side.

There were two or three color options for the shingles and shutters. It was, to my teenage mind, a wasteland that involved endless trimming, mowing, planting, weeding, and keeping up with the neighbors on either side. We even had a white picket fence. I knew every picket, as it was my sister's and my job to crawl around on our hands and knees and use manual clippers on the grass that the mower couldn't reach.

Eventually other developments cropped up around us. Only the original residents of Spring Mill Farms could distinguish where our development ended and the others began.

It was back to this collapsing Chinese fan of suburbia that I went after I was raped.

The old mill, for which my neighborhood was named, had not yet been restored when I was a teenager and the mill owner's house across the street was one of the few old homes in the area. Someone had torched it and the big white house now had black holes for windows and a green wooden railing that was charred and falling-in in places.

Driving by with my mother, as I did every time we went out of the development, I was fascinated by it—its age, the overgrown weeds and grass, and the marks of the fire—how the flames had licked out of the windows and left black ash scars above their rims like crowns.

Fires are something that seemed part of my childhood, and they beckoned to me that there was another side to life I hadn't seen. Fires were horrible, no doubt, but what I became obsessed with was how they seemed, inevitably, to mark a change. A girl I had known down the block, whose house was struck by lightning, moved. I never saw her again. And there was an aura of evil and mystery around the burning of the mill house that gave flight to my imagination every time I passed.

When I was five, I walked into a house near the old Zook graveyard out on Flat Road. I was with my father and grandmother. The house had been ravaged by fire and was set far off from the road. I was frightened but my father was intrigued. He thought that we might scavenge things inside that would add to the boxlike home he and my mother had just moved into. My grandmother agreed.

In the front yard some distance from the house was a half-charred Raggedy Andy doll. I went to pick it up and my father said, "No! We only want salvageable things, not some child's toy." I think that was when it struck me, that we were walking into a place where people like me—children—had lived, but didn't anymore. Couldn't.

Once inside, my grandmother and father got down to business. Most of the house was ruined; what was any good was so blackened by smoke as to be unsalvageable. There was furniture, still, and rugs and things on the wall, but they were black and abandoned.

So they decided to take the banisters from the stairs. "Good old wood," my grandmother said.

"What about upstairs?" my father asked.

My grandmother attempted to dissuade him. "It's black as night up there; besides, I wouldn't trust those stairs."

I'm a good stair tester. I always watch for this in movies where there is a fire and heroes rush in. Do they test the stairs first? If not, the critic in me cries, "Fake!"

My father decided that since I was little I could risk it best. He sent me up the stairs as he and my grandmother worked to dislodge the railings. "Call out what you see!" he said.

"Any furniture or such."

What I remember is a child's room strewn with toys, most specifically Matchboxes, which I collected. They lay on their sides and backs on a braided rug, the die-cast metal bright in yellows and blues and greens in the dark, burned house. There were children's clothes in the open closet, singed along all their hems; an unmade bed. It had happened at night, I remember thinking when I was older. They were sleeping.

In the center of this bed was a small, dark, charred cavity that went through to the floor. I stared at it. A child had died in there.

When we got home, my mother called my father an idiot. She was livid. He arrived with what he thought might be a prize. "These banisters will make great table legs," he announced. I chose to remember the Matchboxes and the Raggedy Andy, but what child leaves behind these toys, even if slightly blackened? Where were the parents, I wondered all that night and in the nightmares that followed. Had they survived?

Out of fire grew narrative. I created for this family a new life. I made it a family like I had wanted: Mom and Dad and a boy and girl. Perfect. The fire was a new beginning.

Change. What was left behind was done so on purpose; the little boy had grown out of his Matchboxes, I imagined. But the toys haunted me. The face of the Raggedy Andy on the path outside, his black and shiny eyes.

The first judgment of my family came from a six-year-old playmate of mine. She was small and blond, that kind of towheaded blondness that dissolves with age, and she lived down the road at the end of the block. There were only three girls my age in the whole neighborhood, including me, and she and I played at being friends until we got lost in the wider world of grade school and junior high.

We were sitting on my front lawn near the mailbox pulling up grass. We had just that week begun to ride on the bus together. As we pulled grass up in fistfuls and made a little pile by our knees, she said, "My mom says you're weird."

Shocked into a sort of mock adulthood, I said, "What?"

"You won't be mad, will you?" she pleaded. I guaranteed her I wouldn't.

"Mom and Dad and Jill's mom and dad said your family is weird."

I began to cry.

"I don't think you're weird," she said. "I think you're fun."

Even then I knew envy. I wanted her blond, strawlike hair, which she wore down, not my stupid brunet braids with the bangs my mother cut by strapping plastic tape across them and cutting along its edge. I wanted her father, who spent time outside and, on the few occasions I ever visited her, said things like "What's shakin, bacon?" and "See you later, alligator." I heard my parents in one ear: Mr. Halls was low-class, had a beer gut, wore workman's clothes; and my playmate in the other: My parents were weird.

My father worked behind closed doors inside the house, had a huge ancient Latin dictionary on a wrought-iron stand, spoke Spanish on the phone, and drank sherry and ate raw meat, in the form of chorizo, at five o'clock. Until the day in the yard with my playmate I thought this was what fathers did. Then I began to catalog and notice. They mowed lawns. They drank beer. They played in the yard with their kids, walked around the block with their wives, piled into campers, and, when they went out, wore joke ties or polo shirts, not Phi Beta Kappa keys and tailored vests.

The mothers were a different matter and I loved mine so fiercely that I never wanted to admit to envy there. I did note that my mother seemed more anxious and less concerned with makeup, clothes, and cooking than the other mothers did. I wished my mother were normal, like other moms, smiling and caring, seemingly, only for her family.

I saw a movie with my father one night on television,
The Stepford Wives.
My father loved it; it scared the hell out of me. I, ofncourse, thought my mother was Katharine Ross, the only real woman in a town where every wife was replaced with a perfect, automated robot of a wife. I had nightmares for months afterward. I may have wanted my mother to change but not to die and never, never to be replaced.

When I was little, I worried about losing my mother. She was often hidden behind the locked door of her bedroom. My sister or I would want her attention in the mornings. We would see our father leave her room and, as we approached, he would explain.

"Your mother has a headache this morning," he might say, or, "Your mother doesn't feel well. She'll be out in a while."

I learned that if I knocked anyway, after my father went downstairs and shut himself up in his study, where we were not allowed to disturb him, that my mother sometimes let me in. I would crawl into bed with her and make up stories or ask her questions.

She threw up in those days and I saw this once when my father hadn't thought to lock the door. When I went inside her bedroom, which had its own bathroom, I could see my father standing in the bathroom doorway with his back to me. I could hear my mother making horrible noises. I rounded the corner in time to see bright red vomit spewing from her mouth into the sink. She saw me staring at her, my eyes hip-level with my father and reflected back to her from the mirror in front of the sink. In her gagging, she pointed me out to my father, who shooed me out of the bedroom and locked the door. They fought later. "For Christ's sakes, Bud," my mother said, "you know well enough to lock the door."

My mother's pillows when I was little smelled like cherries. It was a sickeningly sweet smell. It was the same way my rapist smelled on the night of the rape. I would not admit to myself until years later that this was the smell of alcohol.

I like the story of how my parents met. My father was working at the Pentagon, a better paper-pusher than a soldier. (When, in basic training, he and an army buddy were ordered to scale a wall, he broke his partner's nose by stepping on it, instead of inside the stirrup of this man's hands.) My mother lived with her parents in Bethesda, Maryland, and worked first for
National Geographic Magazine,
and then
The American Scholar.

The two of them were set up on a blind date. They hated each other. My mother thought my father was a "pompous ass," and after a double date with the two people who had set them up, they put the experience behind them.

But they met again a year later. They didn't hit it off exactly, but this time they didn't hate each other, and my father asked my mother out a second time. "Your father was the only one who would take the bus out from the capital and then walk the five miles from the last station to our house," my mother always pointed out. This endeared him to my grandmother, apparently, and eventually my parents wed.

By then my father had a Ph.D. in Spanish Literature from Princeton, and my parents moved to Durham, North Carolina, where he held down his first academic job at Duke University. It was there, alone all day and unable to make friends in this new place, that my mother's drinking took a turn: She began drinking secretly.

My mother had always been nervous; she never acclimated to her prescribed role as housewife. She would repeatedly tell my sister and me how lucky we were to be in our generation. We believed her. The fifties seemed horrible to us. Her father and mine had convinced her to leave her full-time job by emphasizing that a married woman didn't work.

She drank for less than a decade—but long enough for my sister and me to come into the world and have our childhoods. Long enough for my father to move up the academic ranks by taking promotions that took the two of them, and then the four of us, to Madison, Wisconsin; Rockville, Maryland; and, finally, Paoli, Pennsylvania.

By 1977, my mother had been sober for ten years. During this period, she began having things we called "flaps." Flaps were our name for when Mommy went crazy. If my father was an absence—sometimes literally gone to Spain for months—my mother was too much a presence. Her anxiety and panic was infectious, making every moment twice as long and twice as hard when she was under their sway. Unlike normal families, we could not trust that, having left to get food at the local supermarket, we would actually achieve our goal. Two steps into the store, she might begin to have a flap.

"Grab a cantaloupe or something," she would say as I got older, and thrust a bill into my hand. "I'll meet you in the car." She would hunch over during a flap and rapidly rub her breastbone to soothe what she described as her exploding heart. I would rush into the store to buy that cantaloupe and maybe something on sale near the front, wondering all the time, Will she make it to the car? Will she be all right?