passion , I say, with nine-year-old authority.
That’s not why, Maggie , Emily says, deeply irritated. It’s not because they don’t have the passion.
MY FATHER wanted me to be a writer. Actually he wanted me to be whatever I wanted to be. Anything I expressed interest in, he would cut out articles about and leave on my pillow for me to discover when I went to bed. In an attempt to make up for the hardship of the divorce, he let Emily and me decorate our rooms at his new house in any way we wanted. I wanted everything in rainbows. I got it. Emily wanted purple everything, purple lamp shades, purple carpet, purple bedspread. She got it, too.
Our life with him in this house was colorful, hedonistic, and brief. Rainbows of light streamed through the stained-glass rainbow that dangled from gold string in front of my bedroom window. I got a pair of rainbow-striped overalls and wore them nearly constantly. He shepherded Stouffer’s Macaroni and Beef around on dinner plates and served them to us by candlelight. I performed improvised dance routines for him nightly in his living room, accompanied by loud music from his record collection. Tom Waits. Joni Mitchell. Harry Nilsson. Bob Dylan. He graciously watched these performances from the couch with a lowball of Jack Daniel’s in his hand, sometimes nodding off, but always clapping loudly and whistling after my final bow. Other nights he would play the guitar and sing while I climbed onto his back and held on like a monkey. Women came and went, women who would beg along with us, C’mon, Dad, let’s go get ice cream. At least two were named Candy. There were two Marthas, an Ellen, a Vicki, and two Wendys. At Christmas he bought boxes and boxes of silver tinsel for us to decorate the tree, as tinsel had been forbidden by my mother. Christmas at his house that year was an orgy of tinsel. He would die four weeks later.
For her part, after the divorce my mother had become increasingly taken with the ideal of a minimalist Christmas tree: sparse branches that reached horizontally, decorated solely with white lights, red shellacked apples, and plaid bows. She also took to hanging up a red felt scroll with black-and-white photos of her new husband affixed to it, photos taken when he was a toddler, in the late ‘50s, sitting on Santa’s lap in a tweed overcoat and looking about as petulant as he looked to me now. Isn’t he adorable , she said each time she passed it. With a kind of measured sadism whose roots continue to elude me, each Christmas my stepfather would wrap up the Chinese Yellow Pages (which my mother couldn’t read) and blank VHS tapes (which she had no use for) to give to her as gifts, as if to remind her that he hated the holidays, hated gift-giving, and perhaps on some level hated her (and by extension, us), and that he was committed to performing these hatreds each year with a Dadaesque spirit of invention.
But there was a trick: one year he planted a pair of real pearl earrings at the bottom of this pile of wrapped Wal-Mart garbage, so in subsequent years our mother never knew if a treasure were coming. It never did, but the tension remained high; her disappointment, acute.
After several years of this my mother decided that we should start skipping Christmas altogether and go instead to Mexico, which we then did for a few years in a row. I remember my stepfather being there with us only once. I liked going to Mexico, which generally consisted of climbing steep ruins by day and getting drunk with my mother in beachside bars at night, but the trip always gave me the uneasy feeling that we were on the lam, running from something other than Christmas.
IN COURT my mother and I quickly discover that sitting bench for eight or nine hours at a time on the bench is going to be hard on our bodies, so after the first week of the trial we strip the cushions off Jill’s porch furniture The Red Parts 104 and start bringing them to court. Solly also starts bringing a
That’s not why, Maggie , Emily says, deeply irritated. It’s not because they don’t have the passion.
MY FATHER wanted me to be a writer. Actually he wanted me to be whatever I wanted to be. Anything I expressed interest in, he would cut out articles about and leave on my pillow for me to discover when I went to bed. In an attempt to make up for the hardship of the divorce, he let Emily and me decorate our rooms at his new house in any way we wanted. I wanted everything in rainbows. I got it. Emily wanted purple everything, purple lamp shades, purple carpet, purple bedspread. She got it, too.
Our life with him in this house was colorful, hedonistic, and brief. Rainbows of light streamed through the stained-glass rainbow that dangled from gold string in front of my bedroom window. I got a pair of rainbow-striped overalls and wore them nearly constantly. He shepherded Stouffer’s Macaroni and Beef around on dinner plates and served them to us by candlelight. I performed improvised dance routines for him nightly in his living room, accompanied by loud music from his record collection. Tom Waits. Joni Mitchell. Harry Nilsson. Bob Dylan. He graciously watched these performances from the couch with a lowball of Jack Daniel’s in his hand, sometimes nodding off, but always clapping loudly and whistling after my final bow. Other nights he would play the guitar and sing while I climbed onto his back and held on like a monkey. Women came and went, women who would beg along with us, C’mon, Dad, let’s go get ice cream. At least two were named Candy. There were two Marthas, an Ellen, a Vicki, and two Wendys. At Christmas he bought boxes and boxes of silver tinsel for us to decorate the tree, as tinsel had been forbidden by my mother. Christmas at his house that year was an orgy of tinsel. He would die four weeks later.
For her part, after the divorce my mother had become increasingly taken with the ideal of a minimalist Christmas tree: sparse branches that reached horizontally, decorated solely with white lights, red shellacked apples, and plaid bows. She also took to hanging up a red felt scroll with black-and-white photos of her new husband affixed to it, photos taken when he was a toddler, in the late ‘50s, sitting on Santa’s lap in a tweed overcoat and looking about as petulant as he looked to me now. Isn’t he adorable , she said each time she passed it. With a kind of measured sadism whose roots continue to elude me, each Christmas my stepfather would wrap up the Chinese Yellow Pages (which my mother couldn’t read) and blank VHS tapes (which she had no use for) to give to her as gifts, as if to remind her that he hated the holidays, hated gift-giving, and perhaps on some level hated her (and by extension, us), and that he was committed to performing these hatreds each year with a Dadaesque spirit of invention.
But there was a trick: one year he planted a pair of real pearl earrings at the bottom of this pile of wrapped Wal-Mart garbage, so in subsequent years our mother never knew if a treasure were coming. It never did, but the tension remained high; her disappointment, acute.
After several years of this my mother decided that we should start skipping Christmas altogether and go instead to Mexico, which we then did for a few years in a row. I remember my stepfather being there with us only once. I liked going to Mexico, which generally consisted of climbing steep ruins by day and getting drunk with my mother in beachside bars at night, but the trip always gave me the uneasy feeling that we were on the lam, running from something other than Christmas.
IN COURT my mother and I quickly discover that sitting bench for eight or nine hours at a time on the bench is going to be hard on our bodies, so after the first week of the trial we strip the cushions off Jill’s porch furniture The Red Parts 104 and start bringing them to court. Solly also starts bringing a
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