My father drank, and he had a vicious temper. He would yell at my mother at the slightest provocation, then throw up his hands and walk away. My mother was very quiet during these arguments. She never raised her voice. While he shouted at her, she would look down at the ground as if she were to blame. I remember her standing up for herself only once, holding up a knife.
“Don’t come near me,” she told him. He didn’t.
From an early age, I thought of myself as the peacemaker, the glue that held the family together. At home, there was tension between my parents, tension between my sisters, and tension especially between my sister Robin and my father. Robin was always a little wild. By her early teens, she was already wearing makeup and miniskirts. She started dating a guy from “the wrong side of the tracks.” The boy was much older than her, with dark curly hair and a black pickup truck. They would speed off together into town, not coming back until late at night. When my father attempted to ground my sister, she simply ignored him, waltzing out through the front door and never looking back. My father knew he couldn’t control Robin, and this enraged him.
Watching my sisters’ teenage misadventures made me resolve to always be “the good one.” Every time they got into trouble, I quietly promised myself that I would never make the same mistakes.
Once, Robin and my father got into a fight right outside our bedrooms. My father had his hands on Robin’s arms, and she was struggling to free herself, kicking and clawing at him while he clung to her, trying to restrain her. I was terrified he was going to hurt her. I remember I raced out of my room and slid my small body between them, then put my arms out on either side of me; I pleaded with them to stop. But I wasn’t strong enough to separate them. My father shoved me aside, pushing Robin through the open door of her room, where she fell onto her bed. He crouched over her writhing body, his hands around her neck, yelling at her, shaking her. It occurred to me that he was going to kill her. Somehow Robin wriggled free of him and ran out of the house, along the driveway, and out onto the road. My mother and I got in the car to go look for her. Eventually, we found her, hiding behind tall hedges near our bus stop, crying.
Another time I remember going to look for Robin in the woods beyond our house. She was bleeding. I don’t know where the blood came from. In my memory, this moment seems like one from a bad dream, where I don’t know exactly what’s happening or why.
The police were called to our house more than once because of disturbances. I remember the lights of the patrol cars in the driveway, the crunch of the gravel, doors slamming, then the knock on the door that finally stilled the shouting. When I think back on it now, I wonder who called the police. Our neighbors were too far away to hear anything. Maybe it was me.
CHAPTER 7
Carolyn
In their respective rooms, Grace and Carolyn looked out across a city that was now a grid of familiar addresses for the photography studios and advertising agencies where they went for their shoots. They were both so pragmatic, these girls, so completely determined to win their independence. But that didn’t mean they weren’t also romantic. Out there somewhere in the city, they knew, a man was waiting for each of them, their perfect match.
Grace had her own gramophone player, so up in her room, they played their favorite records on repeat. Manhattan Tower by Gordon Jenkins had come out the year before, an entire album of songs and stories about a young man who comes to New York to live in a Manhattan apartment tower and who falls in love. The music was sweeping and sentimental, interspersed with the sounds of taxi horns and traffic hum, an echo of the world outside the windows of their own tower. Then there was Grace’s favorite song, Nat King Cole’s Nature Boy, just released earlier in the year and still at number one. At the Barbizon, Carolyn and Grace lay on their sides on Grace’s single bed, heads propped on hands, listening to its strange, lulling lyrics over and over. “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn,” Nat sang, his voice like velvet, “is just to love and be loved in return.”
Carolyn had already left a boyfriend back in Steubenville. His name was John Criss, and they’d dated the summer after she graduated high school. John had seen her photo in all the newspapers after she was crowned the town’s beauty queen, and he thought she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. So he tracked down her number and called to ask her out; Carolyn was flattered and said yes. John was clean-cut and well dressed, a year older than her and a sophomore at Ohio State. He took Carolyn to the movies in town; they went to the dance hall at Ogilvy Park. A photograph survives of the two of them double-dating with friends, John gazing over at Carolyn, with her blue-black hair and movie-star smile, looking like a man unable to believe his luck. At the end of each evening, John would walk Carolyn back to her house on Pennsylvania Avenue, his hand in hers, but that was as far as it went. Carolyn’s stepfather, Joe, would be waiting at the door, making sure John didn’t get any farther than the front porch.
John’s mother was also
