Hebrew schools, tied down by mortgage payments and car payments, habit and obligation. And he took his misery out on all of us – and, for some reason, on me especially.
Suddenly, it was as if he couldn’t bear to look at me. And nothing I could do was right, or even close.
“Look at this!” he’d thunder, of my B+ in algebra. He was sitting at the dining room table, a familiar glass of scotch at his elbow. I was skulking in the doorway, trying to hide myself in the shadows. “What is your excuse for this?”
“I don’t like math,” I’d tell him. In truth, I was just as ashamed of the grade as he was angry about it. I’d never gotten anything less than an A in my life. But no matter how hard I tried, or how much extra help I got, algebra confounded me.
“Do you think I liked medical school?” he snarled. “Do you have any idea how much potential you have? Do you have any inkling what a waste it is to squander your gifts?”
“I don’t care what my gifts are. I don’t like math.”
“Fine,” he’d say with a shrug, flinging the report card across the table like it had suddenly acquired an offensive smell. “Be a secretary. See if I care.”
He was like that with all of us – snarly, surly, dismissive, and rude. He’d come home from work, drop his briefcase in the hall, pour himself the first in a series of scotch on the rocks, and storm by us, upstairs into the bedroom, locking the door behind him. He’d either stay up there, or retreat to the living room, with the lights turned low, listening to Mahler’s symphonies. Even at thirteen, even without the benefit of a basic music appreciation class, I knew that nonstop Mahler, backed by the rattle of ice cubes in his glass, could portend nothing good.
And when he did bother to speak to us, it was only to complain: how tired he was, how little appreciated; how hard he worked to provide things for us, “you little snobs,” he’d slur, “with your skis and your swimming pool.”
“I hate to ski,” said Josh, who did. One run and he’d head back to the lodge to drink hot chocolate and fret, and if we forced him back out he’d convince the Ski Patrol that he was suffering from imminent frostbite, and we’d have to collect him at the first aid cabin, stripped down to his long underwear and basting under the heat lamps.
“I’d rather swim with the other kids at the Rec Center,” said Lucy, which was true. She had more friends than the rest of us put together. The phone was always ringing. Another sore spot with my father. “That goddamn phone!” he’d yell when it rang during dinner. But we weren’t allowed to take it off the hook. It could be his office, after all.
“If you hate us so much, why did you even have kids?” I’d scream at him, taunting him with what I knew was the truth. He never had an answer – just more insults, more anger, more scalding, punishing rage. Josh, just six, was “a baby.” Lucy, who was twelve, he either ignored or berated. “Stupid,” he’d say, shaking his head at her grades, “Clumsy,” when she’d drop a glass. And, at thirteen, I became “the dog.”
It’s true, thirteen was not the year when I was looking my best. In addition to the breasts and hips I’d sprouted, seemingly overnight, I had acquired a mouthful of complicated- looking metal and rubber bands to correct my overbite. I had a de rigeur Dorothy Hamill haircut, which wasn’t doing my full face any favors. I bought clothes in two sizes – baggy and baggier – and spent the whole year in a perpetual stoop, trying to hide my chest. I looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, only with zits and braces. I felt like a walking affront, like a collection of the things my father spent his days waging war against. He was all about beauty – its creation, its maintenance, its perfection. Having a wife who’d fallen short of the mark and hadn’t stayed thin was one thing, I supposed… but a daughter who’d failed so flagrantly was, evidently, unforgivable. And I had failed. There was nothing beautiful about me at thirteen, nothing at all, and I could feel that fact confirmed in the hard, hateful way he looked at me, and in all the things he said.
“Cannie’s very bright,” I heard him tell one of his golf buddies. “She’ll be able to take care of herself. Not a beauty,” he said, “but smart.”
I stood there, hardly believing what I’d heard, and when I finally believed it, I crumpled inside, like a tin can under a car’s wheels. I wasn’t stupid, and I wasn’t blind, and I knew that there were many ways in which I differed from Farrah Fawcett, from girls in movies and on posters in boys’ bedrooms. But I’d remembered his hand on my head, his beard tickling my cheek as he kissed me. I was his daughter, his little girl. He was supposed to love me. Now he thought I was ugly. Not a beauty… but what father doesn’t think his little girl is beautiful? Except I wasn’t little. And, I guessed, I wasn’t his girl anymore.
When I look at pictures of myself from that time – and, understandably, there are only about four – there’s this horrible desperate look in my eyes. Please like me, I’m pleading, even as I’m trying to hide myself behind a row of cousins at a bar mitzvah, beneath the hot tub bubbles during a pool party, with my lips drawn in a pained smile, stretched tight over my braces, ducking my head into my neck, hunching my shoulders, slouching to make myself shorter, smaller. Trying to disappear.
Years later, in college, when a friend was recounting some bit of suburban childhood horror, I tried to explain how it was with my father. “He was a monster,” I blurted. I was an English major, versed in Chaucer and Shakespeare, Joyce and Proust by then. I still hadn’t found a better word than that.
My friend’s face got very serious. “Did he molest you?” she asked. I almost laughed. Given how much of my father’s conversation with me revolved around how ugly, how fat, how hideous I was, molestation was the last thing I would have expected.
“Did he abuse you?” she asked.
“He drank too much,” I said. “He left us.” But he never hit me. He never hit any of us. It would have been easier if he had. Then there would have been a name we could give it, a box to put it in, a label for the box. There would have been laws, authorities, shelters, TV talk shows where reporters gravely discussed what we were enduring, a built-in recognition of what we’d experienced, to help us through.
But he never raised a finger. And, at thirteen, at fourteen, I had no words for what he was doing to us. I didn’t even know how to start that conversation. What would I have said? “He’s mean?” Mean meant being grounded, meant no television after dinner, not the kind of daily verbal assault my father would routinely deliver over the dinner table, a scathing recitation of all the ways I’d failed to live up to my potential, the walking tour of the places that I had failed.
And who would have believed me? My father was always charm personified to my friends. He remembered their names, and their boyfriend’s names, he would inquire courteously about summer plans and college visits. They wouldn’t have believed me, and if they had they would have wanted me to explain. And I had no explanation, no answers. When you’re on a battleground, you don’t have the luxury of time to dwell on the various historical factors and sociopolitical influences that caused the war. You just keep your head down and try to survive it, to shove the pages back in the book, close the covers and pretend that nothing’s broken, nothing’s wrong.
The summer before my senior year of high school, my mother took Josh and Lucy to Martha’s Vineyard for the weekend. A friend had a rental house, she was itching to get out of Avondale. I had my first summer job, as a lifeguard at a local country club. I told my Mom that I’d stay home, watch the dogs, hold down the fort. I figured it would be fine: I could have the house to myself, entertain my twenty-three-year-old boyfriend away from her watchful eye, come and go as I pleased.
For the first three days it was fine. Then I came home in the predawn hours of the fourth morning, and it was as if I were twelve again. There was my father in the bedroom, the suitcase on the bed, the stacks of white T-shirts and the piles of black socks – maybe the same ones, I thought wildly, that he’d taken the last time.
I stared at them, and then at him. My father looked at me for a long moment. Then he sighed.
“I’ll call,” he said, “when I have my new number.”
I shrugged. “Whatever,” I said.
“Don’t talk to me like that!” he said. He hated when we were flip. He
