needle ever again! I was awake all night, standing over my sleeping parents with a Wusthof butcher knife in one hand. Had either of them stirred I’m certain I would’ve hacked them both to bloody ribbons….”
Me? In hindsight I’d made the same strategic mistake Charles Manson made. I should’ve quit while I was just a garden-variety animal-sex-and-drug addict, but, no, I had to escalate my status to potential knife-wielding psycho…. Small wonder that it was shortly after that particular diary entry that my folks sent my eleven-year-old sexually incorrigible self packing to tedious upstate.
DECEMBER 21, 8:47 A.M. EST
A Prelude to My Exile
Gentle Tweeter,
I wasn’t always a great, fat pudding of a child. As an eleven-year-old I was rail thin. A mere sylph of a girl, with a body-mass index that hovered just above all my major organs failing. Yes, I’d once been a willowy pint-size ballerina with the metabolism of a hummingbird, and as such I gave good value. My job was to serve as the child equivalent of arm candy, proof of my mother’s fertility and my father’s glorious genetic legacy, smiling beside my parents in paparazzi photographs.
And then they sent me to live upstate. The distant memory curdles in my brain.
Upstate. Tedious upstate. It’s one of the few places my parents don’t own a home. Picture a million-billion wounded trees weeping drops of maple syrup into the snow, and—voila—you have upstate. Envision a billion- billion ticks infected with Lyme disease and waiting to bite you.
And not to speak in unkind generalities, but using my mom’s laptop, the eleven-year-old me found a satellite photo of the location. Seen in its entirety, upstate is exactly the same mottled green-on-green as army surplus camouflage. From outer space I could trace the line of State Route Whatever forging a vital transportation link between nowhere and nowhere. I read the names of towns, looking for anyplace famous, and the truth hit me…. There on the map was Woodstock.
Woodstock, NY. Vile Woodstock. Forgive me for what I’m about to admit. For my part I shudder to broach the topic, but my parents first met at Woodstock ’99, where everyone rioted over the price of pizza and bottled water in the center of those thousand noxious acres of overpopulated mud. My mom was just a naked farm girl encased in sweat and patchouli. My dad was a pale, naked dropout from MIT with long greasy dreadlocks, who’d shaved off his pubic hair to look more like the Buddha. Neither of them owned a single pair of shoes.
They fell into a puddle and did the Hot Nasty. His wiener got mud in her woo-woo and she got a UTI, and they got married.
Who says magic doesn’t happen?
Nowadays they tell the story, switching off in tag-team fashion, making strangers laugh at wrap parties and in television green rooms. They stress the mud detail because it gives a self-effacing verisimilitude to the sordid episode.
And, yes, I know the meaning of
As a Somali maid had packed my suitcases, my mother checked each article of clothing for any dry-clean- only labels. Apparently people upstate did laundry by beating their dirty Vivienne Westwood basques between flat rocks on riverbanks. They didn’t have sashimi, either. Nor did they have Internet access, my mother explained. At least, my grandparents did not. Nor did they own a television. Instead, they harbored livestock. Not animals in some distant, abstract sense, like the downward-spiraling number of polar bears or the baby harp seals that lolled on some arctic ice floe, ripe for the Eskimo clubbing; no, these would be nanny goats and chick-chicks and moo- cows that I would tend as part of a daily chore regimen.
Ye gods.
No amount of pleading could stay my banishment, and I was summarily placed in the back of a Lincoln Town Car and whisked off, the whole of one smallish suitcase dedicated just to carrying my ample provisions of Xanax. That summer, at the tender age of eleven, I would learn to swallow my fear. To choke down my pride and my anger. And that would be the last time my mother could boast a skinny daughter.
DECEMBER 21, 8:51 A.M. EST
Papadaddy One
Gentle Tweeter,
Early on, my papadaddy conscripted me in his ongoing campaign against biodiversity. His strategy was that we two crouch in the harsh upstate sunshine and excise every trespassing native plant from a portion of my nana’s vegetable garden, leaving only the nonnative green beans. While we labored shoulder to shoulder, plucking, uprooting, endeavoring to create a questionable monoculture of legumes, he asked me, “Maddy? Dumpling? Do you believe in fate?”
I made no reply.
Still he pressed his topic. “What would you say if every iota of your life was predestined before you was even born?”
I continued to not engage. Clearly he was trying to enroll me in some demented existentialist worldview.
He paused in his weed pulling and turned his wrinkled face to regard me. “What do you know about God and Satan?” An upstate breeze ruffled the strands of his gray hair.
Without meeting his gaze, I killed a weed. I spared a bean plant. I felt like God.
“You know, don’t you, that God and Satan got themselves a feud going?” He glanced around as if to confirm we were alone. No one would overhear. “If I told you a secret, do you promise not to tell your nana?”
I yanked another weed. I promised nothing. Instead, I girded my girlish loins for some hideous revelation.
“What if I told you,” he continued, unbidden, “that you was born the greatest human being who’ll ever live?” He asked, “What if your destiny was to patch things up between God and Satan?”
DECEMBER 21, 8:53 A.M. EST
A Politically Incorrect Feast
Gentle Tweeter,
If you must know, my papadaddy and nana’s isolated upstate farmhouse consisted of a book-lined parlor… two cramped bedrooms… a primitive kitchen… none but a single bathroom. Of the two bedrooms one had been my mother’s, and now it would serve as mine. As I’d been warned, they did not own a television nor any sort of a computer. They did own a telephone, but only of the most rudimentary rotary-dial sort.
A typical luncheon would find me seated at the kitchen table, confronted by a plate filled with my worst eleven-year-old’s nightmare. Veal, for example. Or cheese sourced from nonunion, slave-labor Central Americans. Factory-farmed pork. Gluten. I could taste the spores of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. I could smell the aspartame tested on lab monkeys. When I ventured to ask whether the beef had come from cattle raised on slash-and-burn- decimated Amazon rain forest, my nana merely looked back at me. She lit another cigarette and shrugged. To buy some time I dropped my fork to my plate and launched into a droll recounting of what had happened to me the previous month at Barbra Streisand’s house party, really the most madcap mishap at Babs Streisand’s lavish beachfront villa on Martha’s Vineyard—
