Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders (35 page)

J
ENNIFER
F
INNEY
B
OYLAN
: Can you talk about your parents? How did they meet?

A
NN
B
EATTIE
: My mother saw a handsome boy skate underneath the porch. It was, like, a second- or third-floor apartment building with a porch, screened porch, in the back. And she said to her aunt, “Who is that?” And her aunt said, “Oh, that’s Jimmy Beattie.” And my mother said, “You have just seen my husband skate by.”

But they didn’t marry until—I’m not exactly sure what age my mother was, I think twenty-four, but the Second World War interrupted. And then when he came back on leave from basic training, or something like that, they married. He always insisted they’d given him so many shots, he could hardly stagger up to the justice of the peace. They were only together for a few days, honeymooned at a hotel in DC after they were married, then he went overseas.

JFB:
They had one child, you?

AB:
They had one child, me.

JFB:
So what kind of parents were they? How did being an only child help shape the character of the adult you eventually became?

AB:
I was very shy, and I was cowed by them. They were very, very young. I can remember looking at a home movie that they had years later and thinking, Oh my God, those children were in charge of me?

JFB:
Were they permissive parents? Were they strict?

AB:
They were authority figures. I mean, I think they were a little bit in over their heads. I think they were traumatized by their own childhoods and wanted to do it right, or wanted me not to suffer what they’d suffered. They were very overprotective, as some parents are with only children. But look at their backgrounds. My mother was raised by her grandparents and later by her aunt; her own father died before his thirtieth birthday, and her mother remarried and my mother and her brother lived elsewhere. And my father was raised, for several years, by his grandparents. His biological mother—don’t ask me where she was. She returned from the hospital and disappeared.

They were really pretty vigilant about me.

And it wasn’t the kind of strictness as in, “You can’t do this,” but there was no appeal ever to be made to them. If they said no, the answer was no. I learned pretty early that things were not very negotiable there. I could only hope—and sometimes I did, sometimes whatever I wanted I got. Other times just absolutely no. As in a pet: absolutely no. So I never had a pet.

JFB:
Not that you’re still resentful after all these years. [
Laughs
]

AB:
Yeah, that’s crazy. I mean, if you’ve got an only child, why wouldn’t you want the kid to have a pet?

JFB:
So you were a good girl?

AB:
Pretty much. When I was a teenager I was hardly the most horrifying of the most horrifying, but I was in juvenile court when I was a teenager. For one thing, I learned how to blow up toilets with cherry bombs. A friend’s brother taught me, and so that wasn’t such a great idea to do it, like, toilet number one, two, three, and four,
because by toilet number four many of the teachers were simply lined up in the corridor to see who was going to exit the ladies’ room. [
Laughs
]

JFB:
I’m trying to square the girl who was blowing up toilets with the girl who has her own, I’m going to guess, princess telephone, although it probably wasn’t a princess telephone.

AB:
It was a princess phone, pink.

JFB:
I love those. [
Laughs
]

AB:
I was very unhappy when I was a teenager. I could introspect forever, and I would not really have the answer to this. To have been a total D and F student—it wasn’t that I wasn’t trying, it was that I have the kind of mind that can’t be interrupted by bells ringing at twenty- or thirty-minute intervals.

JFB:
What was behind all that unhappiness?

AB:
I don’t know.

I was pretty shy, from being an only child. But as time went on I did worse and worse and worse in school. It certainly did erode my sense of self-esteem.

JFB:
So when it was—when the opportunity came to blow up a toilet with a cherry bomb, was it just—?

AB:
Why not? I’ve got the cherry bomb, what else am I going to do with it?

JFB:
Were your parents literary in any sense?

AB:
They always read me a lot of books. I had a lot of books, Little Golden Books. I had a lot of books when I was young, and I liked them a lot, and they always—both of them read to me when I was a little girl. My father read me the comic strips. I would sit in his lap on Sunday, and they always read me a book before I went to sleep.

My father had a headboard and it contained only a few books, and they were:
Your Life as a
—his astrological sign was Cancer—
Your Life as a Cancer, Help for Your Aching Back, Foot Reflexology
, and
How to Sell Your House Without a Real Estate Agent
. So if that isn’t, like, a time capsule, you know, what some guy who didn’t read would have around as books, I don’t know what is. Perfect.

JFB:
In the early seventies, when you first started publishing these amazing stories in the
New Yorker
, what did your parents think?

AB:
Well, both of my parents were very pleased, really, and I’m sure somewhat taken aback; you know, where did this all come from? And they must’ve thought, too: Is this going to last? Even I thought that. I was making—when I say so much money from the
New Yorker
, I mean I was making quadruple what I made teaching freshman comp, but it never occurred to me to let my job go.

My mother called me one time when I was living in Eastford, Connecticut, this little town in the middle of nowhere. And she said, “I’ve just read your father your first book,
Chilly Scenes of Winter
.” And I knew—I told you what the books were that he’d read. You know, I thought, Read my father
Chilly Scenes of Winter
? Wow.

JFB:
Out loud?

AB:
Yeah. That must have been a mind-bending experience. What could that have been like? And she said, “I’ll put Dad on.” So then I hear my father, and he—I mean, this would be like me trying to commend somebody on some physics experiment. So he said, “Well, your mother—yes, your mother has just read me
Chilly Scenes of Winter
.”

And I said, “Daddy, what did you think of that?” And he said, “I’ll tell you one thing, it was a hell of a lot better than ‘This is the forest primeval.’ ”

JFB:
He was quoting Henry Wadsworth Longfellow? “This is the forest primeval” being the opening line from—is it
Evangeline
?

AB:
Yes. I had no idea my father could quote anything, anything from any book ever. That was the first time I had ever heard him quote. The last thing he remembered reading before
Chilly Scenes of Winter
was
Evangeline
. When he was—what? Probably fourteen or something? You know? “It was a hell of a lot better than ‘This is the forest primeval.’ ”

And on another occasion he said something like, “So, some of the things in the stories, the table you describe, that’s your aunt’s table.” And I’d say, “Uh-huh.” And he’d say, “But the story wasn’t about your aunt.” And I’d say, “No, no, the table stuck in my mind, so I—you
know, I needed to think about what table would be in the story, and I—yeah, that’s her table. That’s her table.”

And he said, “I’ll tell you one thing. You beat the system.” So he was proud of me just for not—

JFB:
You beat the system?

AB:
Yeah, so he was proud of me for not being a nine-to-fiver. My mother was a more sophisticated reader than that, but also some of the stories were painful, not because she thought they were autobiography, because she knew me well enough to understand that they weren’t autobiography. I don’t see why she would’ve mistaken them for that, either. But a lot of them were pretty serious, pretty sad stories that I started publishing, pretty cryptic stories, in the
New Yorker
, and certainly in terms of what she was used to reading, and even in terms of what she knew about me, they must’ve come from a place that surprised her.

JFB:
Those stories are not exactly Sherlock Holmes.

AB:
That’s right.

JFB:
Did any of your stories hit particularly close to home? Did they ever admit to that?

AB:
One of the things that my mother said—she was very humorous in the way that she expressed herself a lot of the time—and the way she put it was, she’d read a story of mine, she read a story called “Desire” that was in the
New Yorker
.

And she called me, and there was a message on my answering machine when I came home, and she started off with one tone of voice: “Mama has just bought and read your story of, you know, February tenth, ‘Desire.’ ” And then her voice totally changed, and she said, “Mama is so sorry you ever thought that.”

JFB:
Was your mom one of these moms who was hoping that you’d have children?

AB:
I already knew I didn’t want to have kids.

JFB:
When did you know that?

AB:
I’m not saying I’ve never liked children, you know, individual children and so forth, but I—there was never a time that I really
thought, “Oh boy, when I grow up I can get married and have children.” Never. I’m not so keen on joining up with the operative system.

I mean, I don’t even have many houseplants.

JFB:
What do you think the main thing is that you got from her?

AB:
A sense of equilibrium and a sense of humor.

JFB:
Tell me what you mean by “equilibrium.”

AB:
A kind of consistency and belief in yourself, not because of anything you can name, necessarily, but because you trust yourself enough to have some kind of consistency that serves you as well as other people.

JFB:
So it sounds like your mom was proud, delighted, and a little bit astonished by you? That you became a writer was almost as surprising to her as if you’d been blowing up toilets with a cherry bomb.

AB:
I think the blown-up toilets were much stranger to her. Than literature.

VERONICA GERHARDF

©
Veronica Gerhardf

It was like the shining golden center of my heart was gone. I didn’t even have me to replace it with
.

Veronica Gerhardf
^*
was my student at Colby College in the early nineties, and later my friend. She was Zach’s nanny during his first year. Later, she and her husband moved to Ithaca, New York, and Veronica became pregnant with their first child at age twenty-eight. That’s when things got complicated.

V
ERONICA
G
ERHARDF:
I went in for the fifteen-week sonogram. We had the sonogram and saw the baby. Afterwards they put us in an exam room and the doctor came and talked to us and he said, “Well, the sonogram tech thinks that she sees something. She thinks that she sees some swelling or some fluid at the back of the neck. That can be a number of things. It can just be a temporary thing, but it can be an indication of something more serious. So we want to refer you to a neonatologist. We’re going to make you an appointment. It’s about forty-five minutes away.”

J
ENNIFER
F
INNEY
B
OYLAN:
So you leave this doctor’s office now with this weird shadow hanging over you.

VG:
Well, not at that point, because they said it could be the quality
of the sonogram, it could be the tech. There are so many variables at this point. So we’re just going to check it out.