Solitaire
Aimee Liu
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Originally published by Harper & Row
Copyright © 1979, 2000 by Aimee Liu
Designed by Eve Kirch
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3681-8
Distributed in 2016 by Open Road Distribution
180 Maiden Lane
New York, NY 10038
www.openroadmedia.com
Preface
Foreword
1. Backward Glances
2. Puberty Blues
3. Lean Dreams
4. Thin Fever
5. Triad
6. Less Becomes More
After the Fast: A Postscript
When this memoir was first published I was twenty-five years old. That was the same year when compulsive binging and purging was first named bulimia nervosa. The term for compulsive self-starvation, anorexia nervosa, had a much longer history, but I’d never heard the term during the adolescent years when I struggled with my eating disorder. Neither had my parents, friends, or doctors. Back then, there were no memoirs of anorexia or bulimia. And this was why, when I did first learn that these syndromes are diagnosable illnesses, I thought it could be helpful to others if I described my own subjective experience.
At the time, I didn’t fully understand what had “caused” my obsession with weight and self-denial any more than I knew what specific changes or choices were responsible for my return to health during college. And there was no one back then who could have told me. But I recalled vividly the social, emotional, and physical consequences of my eating disorder. I was keenly aware of the distortions in my thinking and perception that had accompanied my compulsive exercise and food restrictions, and I knew the price I’d paid academically and the toll it had taken on my family and relationships. I hoped that if my parents could read what had been going on in my teenage head we might have more compassion and understanding for each other going forward. And I hoped that if younger teens saw what the internal experience of an eating disorder is like, they’d be wary about placing too much importance on weight, dieting, and appearance. I wanted to encourage them to feel less pressure to look perfect, and more freedom to accept their true and natural selves. If they did, I believed, they would be less susceptible to eating disorders.
I still believe that. Unfortunately, our society’s emphasis on appearance has intensified in the intervening decades, and the academic and emotional pressures on adolescents have only escalated. At the same time, scientific research has shown that eating disorders are much more complex conditions than I realized when I was writing about my own experience. Genes play a large role in determining who is vulnerable to anorexia and bulimia, and who is not. So do brain chemistry and biological temperament—personality. In fact, by 2007, there were so many new insights into the deeper nature of eating disorders that I wrote another book about what we know now that I didn’t know when I wrote Solitaire.
That book, Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders, revisits not only my own history but also those of the friends I wrote about in this 1979 memoir. It attempts to connect the dots between our early experiences of anorexia and bulimia and those of other men and women of all ages who’ve struggled with these disorders. And it explores the reasons why these illnesses now are understood and treated as biologically based mental illnesses. I wish my friends and I had had access to this understanding and treatment when we were young. Our recoveries would no doubt have been speedier and more complete if such treatment had been available. I say this because, in the course of writing Gaining, I met many gifted and compassionate specialists who are successfully curing eating disorders today. So I urge the readers of this edition to seek psychological help, preferably from an experienced eating disorder specialist, if you recognize yourself in the obsessions and compulsions described in these pages. If you need information or referrals, visit the Academy for Eating Disorders at www.aedweb.org.
The experience of writing Gaining also taught me a great deal about the vulnerability of certain individuals to images and ideas that can trigger eating disordered behavior. Specific calorie counts and comparisons of body weight are common triggers. And so I’ve removed all such non-essential numbers from this edition of Solitaire. Because the story would make no sense without description of the actual behaviors involved in an eating disorder, I’ve kept some episodes of binging, purging, and fasting, but these are not the focal point of the book.
My original focus in these pages was the existential struggle, which I still believe is core to eating disorders. Eating is such a primal behavior and food such a primal need that when our brains “choose” not to eat normally and naturally, this signals a primal problem. For me and virtually every other person I’ve ever met who’s suffered from an eating disorder, that problem involves identity. Who am I in the world? Why don’t I know who I am? Why am I forced to be someone different than who I am? Why do I feel so wrong? Why can’t others see that I feel empty inside? These are the kinds of questions that my eating disorder signaled, and that I wanted to bring out into the open when I first wrote this memoir. Learning how to answer them and how to embrace the truth that was contained within them proved to be an essential part of my own recovery. If my story can shed some light on yours or offer inspiration, I am grateful.
Aimee Liu
July 2013
Los Angeles
THE CHILD I was babysitting lay asleep upstairs. His parents weren’t due home for another three hours, ample time for temptation to seize me. The lure of the television, the call of my homework were no competition for the magnet of the kitchen: food. Like a creature obsessed, neither tasting nor thinking, I burrowed through cupboards, refrigerator, cookie jar, and freezer. Grabbing fistfuls of Mallomars and brownies, gulping ice cream, Jell-O, and cheese, I was indiscriminate in my gorging. Frenzied, as though possessed by some malevolent phantom, I raced through the larder and could quit only after collapsing in glutted agony. Then, when the spell finally broke, I loathed myself for such weakness and raged at my failure of willpower.
Staggering to the bathroom, I presented myself for penitence. The mirror cast its wrath upon me. My reflection resembled that of a bloat-bellied malnutrition victim. My scrawny arms, bony chest, and spindly legs cried out in protest against the distended abdomen of my cruel binge. The sight nauseated me. No doubt about it, eating was evil. My faith in the virtue of abstinence grew the longer I stood examining myself. It sent me into spasms of remorse over my greed and propelled me into a program of redemption.
I began by vomiting. Like yoga, my method relied on muscle contraction and concentrated control. But unable to purge myself completely this way, I worked out a backup maneuver. My magic cure was Ex-Lax. It was like swallowing Drano. The only problem was that the effects were not instantaneous, and I was desperate for immediate relief. I could feel the calories turning to fat as I waited. My last resort was exercise. Like an expectant mother, I bent over my swollen stomach to touch toes, gasped through hundreds of jumping jacks, and struggled through feverish sit-ups. Not even the impending homecoming of my employers could subdue me. Keeping an ear cocked for the sound of the garage door opening, I kept working out for as long as possible. I was haunted by the thought that a single carbohydrate might escape my frenzy and become flesh.
My penance lasted days afterward. Rejecting all but the merest tastes of food, I raged at my parents as they urged me to eat. My mother worried. My father winced at the sight of my protruding clavicles. But I kept examining the fluctuations of the bathroom scale with the zeal of a religious fanatic. When, at the end of a three- or four-day fast, my pelvis sank to a hollow shell once again, I gloried in this proof of strength and determination. Loss of weight had become my personal path to honor; starvation was the goal of my adolescence.
MINE WAS A CHILDHOOD frosted with affluence, filled with adventure, and sprinkled generously with loving care. Throughout the early years I led a cupcake existence, wrapped in my parents’ unspoken promises that they had me destined for the best of all possible worlds. They would treat me to experiences out of the ordinary and nourish me on the good fortune of their success. They would educate me, groom me in keeping with their impeccable taste, and then, one day, would release me to take the reins on my own. But first they would make sure that I appreciated the special kind of wealth to which I’d been born.
My earliest recollections date back to the two years my family spent in India. I was just three when we moved there. Scott, my brother, was eleven. My father spent the better part of those years winging about the Orient as he searched out films for the United Nations Documentary Film Department, and my mother spent her days organizing the Emporium, an Indian design center for handicrafts and hand-loomed fabric. But neither Scott nor I felt any sense of neglect. We attended school with our international compatriots—the children of State Department representatives, of Ford Foundation workers, and of delegates of other assorted global agencies. It was, as I look back on it, an idyllic life for a child.
We lived in the diplomatic enclave in a house that shimmered under the care of a small host of servants. As per the norm for Westerners residing in Delhi, we employed a cook, gardener, sweeper, bearer, and a sequence of ayahs to look after my brother and me. In addition to the members of our own household, however, we had at our disposal an overwhelming array of neighborhood playmates, their servants, and a constant, astonishing native street parade of passing bullocks, bicycles, tongas, and pedestrians. The sights were both thrilling and alarming. There were sometimes elephants with bells on their tails, but I also saw starving babies peppered with flies and wraithlike ancients plodding miles to do work for pennies. We visited emerald gardens watered by shooting fountains and punctuated by scarlet, ivory, and golden blossoms, but we also shopped in Old Delhi, where skeletal beggars pawed at our sleeves. There were snake charmers and sadhus, temples to rats and monkeys, and thousands sleeping in the streets, but to me it was all an integral part of the mystical, outrageous place I called home. Too young to worry at the suffering and too naive to ignore it, I accepted it as an unavoidable part of life in this crazy world. Healthy, safe, and happy myself, I watched the contrasts weave through the streets and took pleasure in the exhilaration of constant surprise. Not for many years would the paradoxes come back to haunt me. In the meantime I felt spiritually at ease, as perhaps only a child can.
India glistens in my memory like a brocaded tapestry of color, sound, and scents. We take trips into the mountains where Kashmiri houseboats float on water-lilied lakes and Kiplingesque hill stations overlook citrine valleys. Bejeweled temples glitter with thousands of candles during the nights of Diwali, the festival of light; and during Holi, the celebration of fertility, the streets blaze gaudily with explosions of colored water. The climatic changes are just as startling as the cultural displays. One night the air feels balmy and sweet, the next it turns to poison. Sometimes storms leap, like the cyclone in The Wizard of Oz, out of nowhere. In summer we sleep on the roof, our beds crude charpoys. These cots are wood frames strung with hemp rope. They are uncomfortable, but the sky twinkles with diamond stars and the darkness smells of flowers, and I don’t mind that it’s hard to sleep. But then the winds begin to churn. The dust storm is coming. My parents yell for us to go downstairs. They grab bedding and slam doors and windows as we descend. For days the choking attack may last. It fills the house with veils of dirt, despite all attempts at insulation, and whirls across the desert city like a mad hatter. And while my mother despairs of the filth and worries over the fate of the homeless poor, I thrill to the excitement with a three-year-old’s careless delight. Danger and despair are foreign to me. I stand laughing with my back to a splintery window jamb. My brother plays tag with me this afternoon while my parents are off at a tea party. Taunting me from across the room, he can’t see the scorpion on the ledge behind me. He goads me toward the window where the deadly villain tickles my fingertip. I think the itch is a bit of screening come loose from the frame, but as the irritation continues I look down and scream. It’s horribly ugly, but dangerous? The thought never occurs to me. In fact, I’m pleased to discover that my life was in danger. It makes me feel special that I’ve been so spared. I must have an important future ahead of me.
Each home in the diplomatic enclave is surrounded by a high wall of mortar and clay. The grounds inside these fortress walls seem like fairytale gardens designed for small children at play. Cut off from the native bustle and stilled by the beat of the desert sun, they flourish under the care of full-time gardeners. They become, with a quick wish, jungles of Africa or tropical rainforests. Alone at play beneath the shrubs that border our yard, I hunt wild game. The earth under my knees feels moist. It glows with the reflected daylight, slightly green through the leaves. I push confidently through the tropical petals and vines, stalking the beasts whose eyes blaze at me from behind the trunks of imaginary trees. Beyond the sheltering vegetation the day swelters and glares, but deep within my fantasy woodland I feel only the heat of the hunt. When suddenly I meet my prey, however, he defies me to harm him. I can’t. He is a determined little fellow the size of my fist, his shell a perfect spiral the hue of sand. We share an immunity to danger. I respect his intrepid determination and sense of direction. We become instant friends, this fearless traveler and I, and though we won’t ever meet again, I will always consider him a symbol of freedom and bliss.
It is October 1958 when we return to Glenridge, Connecticut. We drive from the docks of New York in a green Mercedes that my parents bought in Germany on the way home. Home? I balk at the word now. As far as I’m concerned we’ve left my home. As we speed along concrete byways past franchised supermarkets and barren shopping centers, I recognize nothing of America and like little of what I see. I refuse to pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States…
We turn up a drive between evergreen shrubs and steep glacial rock formations, round the top of the hill, and slip into the somber pocket of land where my parents tell me we live.
The neighbors have planted a multicolored sign at the fork in the road, lest we have lost direction after two years away. Cheery balloons fly from the post, and a painted clown laughs and points out our way. (Is this a homecoming or a birthday party?) But despite the merry guidepost, this place feels eerie, too quiet and empty. Where are the children, the animals, the beggars, the sounds? I miss the drumbeat, the tempo of my former life. Here there’s not a soul in sight, only the crimson leaves of autumn falling to greet us.
The house in which I will spend the rest of my childhood looms handsomely before us. The antithesis of our whitewashed, Delhi domicile, this sprawling lodge boasts fieldstone, Cyprus wood, and glass. My parents view it proudly. They built it themselves before I was born. My brother leaps from the car and runs to explore. He remembers the way the living room snuggles into the crook of an abandoned rock quarry. He has played for hours in the graveled patio out back, splashed in the fountained goldfish pond, and hidden in the crannies of my mother’s rock garden. I recall none of it. Following my mother through the cathedral-like living room, I feel a dwarf and an outsider. Slate floors, windows twenty feet high, great beamed ceilings, and everywhere the aura of forest (real this time, not make-believe)—I don’t know what to make of it.
At the front we have pasture, on the sides woods, and at the back sweeping lawns and gardens. But unlike the yards of India, ours here has a wild look about it. Not manicured by gardeners, not fertilized and pampered, these grounds seem almost self-sufficient. I listen for the chant of bear and monkey wallahs, for the pipe song of snake charmers and the rasp of sweepers’ brooms. But the only sound is the chilly moan of breezes among the pines. This place promises loneliness and an inexplicable sort of gloom.
My father takes me for a tour of the neighborhood and tells me its story. I try, for future reference and to establish a sense of belonging, to get the details straight. The marble amphitheater (facsimile of a Greek arena), hidden in the back woods, was built in the spirit of bygone eras. Sparkling white and flanked by a ring of overgrown Christmas trees, it is a freak product of the Great Depression. Its creator was one of the fortunate few who could afford to be generous during hard times. An architect unscathed by the crash, he designed a house for a client in Vermont who paid him in marble instead of dollars. The ingenious Mr. Blanchard had his prize brought in trainloads to Connecticut, drew up plans for his personal stage, and set the hungry laborers of the area to work. At about the same time he had built for his children two clay-floored tennis courts and a fifty-foot swimming pool, which resembles a Polynesian watering hole. It is fashioned into a bed of natural rock and fitted with a circulation system that works by means of waterfalls. A sand-filled sunbathing area lines one side, a tiered rock garden the other. I imagine it filled with laughing children diving inexhaustibly into water that shimmers in the sunshine. I pretend that we can hear the chatter of grown-ups as they volley in the courts across the way. For now the courts are empty, overgrown with goldenrod, and frogs leap in the stagnant puddle of water that still remains in the bottom of the pool. The owner, a retired actress, doesn’t care to entertain any longer. My father tells me that in the old days, before I was born, there were grand parties here. All the neighbors gathered for barbecues. They hung paper lanterns in the trees and floated watermelons in the pool to chill. That was when my brother was my age, and the other kids of the community had not yet gone away to boarding school and college. Why did I miss out on all the fun? Why is there no one my age here now to keep me company? I feel cheated and alone.
All the splendors of field and stream can’t comfort me. We visit a secret pond over the hill behind our front pasture. Water lilies float on its surface. Skunk cabbages flourish on its shore. We sight a muskrat scurrying for cover in the woods and tiptoe across the dam that drains this man-made lake. Then my father shows me an island which I may take for my very own. It rises out of a bog on the edge of our property and has a carpet of moss all over it. Its only resident is a single baby oak tree and an imbedded rock, the ideal seat for me. I plan to play explorer here, to build bridges around it and, after winter snows, to shovel roads across the surface of the bog and make towns in miniature on the ice. But I don’t want to realize these plans all by myself. As my father proudly assesses his estate I try to echo his delight at coming home, but the nudge of loneliness spoils my best intentions.
On the Monday of our second week back in the States my mother takes me to school. North Mianus has been in session for over a month already. I feel like an interloper, walking into classes in progress. My mother and Miss Bloom, the kindergarten teacher, pore over my registration papers while I survey the situation from a corner by the door.
I am different from the other children in the room. I am one-quarter Chinese. I have lived in the Orient. I have sailed across the ocean and flown in planes. I have applauded dancing bears, taken a seat in Nehru’s lap, and cast marigolds on Gandhi’s tomb. But the little girls I see playing store by the opposite wall think all Indians wear feathers in their hair. Their world stops at the edge of Candlewood Park, and their notion of a great excursion is a trip to New York City. Everyone here has fair skin and a well-nourished air. The scene before me looks like an advertisement for Sealtest milk, quite a contrast to the environment I have left behind. Whether my difference marks me superior or inferior worries me. I feel both at the same time and wish I felt neither. But the fact remains: The homogeneity of these kindergarteners excludes me. I feel as though I’ve just dropped in from another planet.
Then my mother leaves. The panic that results is like nothing I’ve ever known before. Stranded, I view this antiseptic playroom world with mistrustful eyes. Miss Bloom acts friendly enough, but the little people threaten me. Tina, Kimmy, Wendy, Cappy, Susan, Peter, Connie, Kenny, Sam, Billy, Stan—the names wash over me at random, all too American. I am used to mingled nationalities and strange-sounding titles. It’s fun to roll the vowels and consonants of exotic languages across one’s tongue. When everyone’s a stranger, struggling with communication barriers, everyone somehow belongs. Here, where all the names sound flatly alike, any deviation from the norm strikes out. A-I-M-E-E, I spell, L-I-U. The other kids look at me as though I’m crazy. I try to explain, my first name is French. My last is Chinese. But they can’t, or won’t, understand, and the teacher interrupts to tell us it’s time for cookies and milk.
Not hungry, I eat. It’s a constant game of follow-the-leader, this kindergarten business, and it bores me. We must bring blankets from home, spread them out on the floor and, in the middle of the day, pretend to sleep. The drawn shades and doused lights can’t fool me. I am not used to naps, don’t like to rest, but because I am obedient, I close my eyes and stretch out, stiff as a twig, until Miss Bloom allows us to rise. It makes no sense, but I comply, just as I make believe that I like to play house, skip rope, and construct skyscrapers out of blocks. When my mother picks me up at the end of the day I wail of frustration and boredom. Still, another side of me longs to fit in.
A strange new craving for companionship overwhelms me, but it is thwarted from the start by circumstance. If my family lived in Candlewood Park or on Primrose Drive or Mimosa Lane, my problems would be solved. I could learn to like the other kids if I lived around them, played with them after school, cruised with them on weekends from backyard to backyard. They would include me in their plans and learn that I am not weird after all. They would have me over for dinner, and afterward I could join too when the neighborhood youngsters came out to play softball in the street. During the winter we would all sled together, and skate on the Mianus River. We would trade boyfriends and best friends, the girls down the block and I, and give each other surprise birthday parties (with the help of our mothers, of course). But the only assistance my mother is able to give me is to drive me over to visit those paradise neighborhoods. And no matter how frequently I come to play, no matter how familiar my face becomes in the community “gangs,” we all know that I remain an outsider.
It isn’t only physical distance that separates me from them. Our lifestyles, our parents, our habits too have little in common. My home is a world unto itself, my family unlike any other I meet in Glenridge. Ozzie-and-Harriet patterns really do predominate in the suburbs, but not at our house. While my schoolmates’ parents meet for bridge games and backyard barbecues, mine attend receptions at the French Embassy, balls at the Waldorf, and openings at the Metropolitan. And, to the stupefaction of the Candlewood Park crowd, they frequently take me with them to these functions. At penthouse dinner parties I steal the show. That I am the only seven-year-old among ambassadors and presidents never bothers me. I strut like Shirley Temple through the reception lines and chat freely with foreign ministers until my bedtime, when I trundle off to some darkened bedroom to doze between mountains of coats and furs until my parents are ready to leave. There are recitals of African music in the nave of the General Assembly, sessions of the Ecumenical Council. I cultivate a taste for caviar, brie, and strawberries in wine, and learn to address adults by their first names. The world of the elite, a fantasy land far from my daily woes, delights me. The scent of protocol tempts me to grow up, or at least pretend to grow up, very fast.
Thanksgiving 1960. It’s the year the Jones boys slather their pumpkin pie with ketchup while our parents argue over chestnut dressing and creamed onions about the future of JFK. It’s the year my brother and Chas Jones, both fifteen, remain downstairs after dinner with the grown-ups while Cliff Jones and his buddy, Dick, take me up to the attic. Aged twelve, they laugh. Aged seven, I don’t.
Of course, I don’t really consider it a big deal. Not necessarily a bad deal, anyhow, I believe what they tell me: It’s just fooling around; it’s my privilege to be included in their games. One little girl with two big boys, I am their obedient slave, anxious to please as long as they’ll let me stay. Oh, please, please like me! Please accept me! Show that you want me, that you approve of me. I’ll do anything to be included, to prove that I’m good enough to belong. Let me into your club too!
We play tag around the attic first. Catching splinters in our socks and cobwebs in our hair, we sing about Casey Jones and choo-choo-choo through dark, musty closets.
Downstairs the adults chortle at some innocent joke, their mirth rising through the floorboards in muted waves. My parents think we’re watching TV. Whatever Cliff has in mind, I sense it’s forbidden.
“I know! Let’s take off all our clothes and play horse!”
Dick eagerly seconds the motion. I keep quiet. What’s so great about going naked? You can play horse with your clothes on just as well. I have never seen a boy in the raw, never particularly wanted to. But what has a pawn to say against a king’s wishes?
We strip and play horse. They ride me bareback on their shoulders. They toss me back and forth between them, all the while hushing my nervous shrieks. Cliff scampers down to make sure the door at the bottom of the stairs is locked against detection from below. Suddenly I’m frightened. Why are they so worried, so afraid of being found out? Security fades. I am out of control, damned if I do and damned if I don’t. But do or don’t what? Bewildered and masking my terror, I must simply wait and see what they have in store for me.
“Now let’s switch places,” Cliff whispers. They giggle together, sharing a secret they know I don’t know. They carry me to a corner under the eaves. Cliff lies on his back, knees bent, and stretches his arms upward to receive me. Dick lifts me over him and guides my movements from behind. I straddle this peculiar body. Crouch, kneel, stroke, stroke. Our skins stick. It tickles and embarrasses me. This is pointless, not fun at all. Even the boys have stopped laughing. Their genitals disgust me. So ugly, hanging loose and limp, what function can they possibly serve? The shriveled sacs of flesh graze my under-aged chest and belly, explore between my thighs. I laugh and cry, and wonder why. Not talking, the boys roll me between them like a larger-than-life baby doll. Cliff tickles me to keep me smiling. I dare not scream or struggle, though I long to pull loose and run downstairs to my mother’s arms. They explore me like a foreign animal.
At last the time is up. My father calls that we’re going home. The boys swear me to secrecy as we dress. They have honored me with their trust. I must not betray them. But they don’t need to worry about any oaths of secrecy. Whatever it is that we’ve done wrong, I accept the blame myself. It was an adventure, one to which I agreed, even encouraged. As long as they let me stay in their club I’ll keep their secret and, if need be, take the rap. Deep inside I hate the boys for what they’ve done, but I turn the accusation for their mysterious sin against myself instead of them.
It fell like a shaft out of midnight. My forehead burst into blood as my head reeled with a thousand sparks. Swathed in curtains, I tumbled back onto my mother’s bed while outside the dog howled. In an instant my mother swept me into her arms and raced me to the bathroom to cleanse my messy but minor wounds. My father never woke through it all.
Earlier in the evening dangerous visions had danced through my head. I met again the rattlesnake my parents had taken me to view at a local museum that afternoon. Entrancing me as none of the cobras in India had, this hideous creature coiled in his cage warned of imminent doom. At bedtime I had trouble falling asleep, though curled in my tightest fetal position, and hugged myself for comfort. I felt his threat in its purest essence. My assassin slipped from his mountaintop prison, slithered down Putnam Avenue, and sped by the light of the moon straight toward my bedroom. He knew the way intuitively and arrived outside my window just as I woke screaming.
My mother called sleepily from her room for me to join her in bed. I was too scared to move. But then, the silence and darkness were worse. My mother had fallen back to sleep and I was once more alone. Whether I closed my eyes or kept them open, my attacker still threatened to appear. Be brave. He’s imaginary, remember. I leapt from my covers across the room, scooted out into the hall and around the corner to the safety of my mother’s sleeping form.
So soft, so rounded, she received me without words. Her waist-length hair, unfamiliarly released from its daytime French twist, enfolded me. She kissed my forehead and pulled her cashmere blanket up under my chin. I nestled into her scent of perfume and night flesh, and, for a moment, forgot my fears.
But within minutes Clem began to bark outside. Perhaps he had sniffed the snake? My father mumbled in his sleep. My mother tossed in annoyance and flicked me out of bed to let Clem in. The carpet felt cold and crawly beneath my feet. I tripped over the drapes that cloaked the door and, without pulling them back, began to fumble with the lock. Clem again cried in the darkness. He sounded as terrified as I. I yanked at the knob and the door flew open. The curtain rod came crashing down, enveloping me in shrouds of blood-drenched fabric. The dog yelped, my mother sprang into action, and my father continued to doze.
He is a silent character, my father, forty years my senior and inscrutably intelligent. He works hard, rushing into New York early each morning and returning late at night, and rarely speaks to me. His is a world of politics and international affairs. He has no time for my child’s concerns. Not cold or cruel or strict, he wears a quiet that prohibits intrusion. He needn’t withdraw if approached or beckoned; he simply doesn’t respond. But I doubt he means to offend me. Certainly he loves and provides for me generously enough. If only we could talk.
During my vacations from school I commute with him to New York to spend whole days at the United Nations. We sit like strangers on the train, he chain-smoking and scanning the morning paper, I trying to think of something to say. That my teacher has praised my penmanship? That my third grade is going to take a field trip to the beach to hunt for horseshoe crabs? That Kimmy has invited me to her birthday party? I can think of nothing that would interest him, and so keep my mouth shut and stare. I can’t believe that we look alike. He has heavy pouches beneath his eyes, and flat lids above them. As a result he seems to squint perpetually. My own eyes look like round almonds. His hair lies thick and black, beginning to glimmer gray. He keeps it trim and parted on the side. Mine hangs long and brown with flecks of auburn. Dad has a high rectangular forehead, a prominent nose, and incipient jowls. My face is round, capped with a widow’s peak, and my nose is almost comically small. Why does it bother me that we have so little in common?
At the end of our ride the world of the city distracts me. Mammoth and hushed as a cathedral, Grand Central is awesome. On the distant ceiling an ancient astrological chart describes the heavens in gold and green. So sedate it seems by contrast with the garish Kodak wall photographs and coffee shops below. I find something comforting in the way this great station spans time and taste and distance. There seems room here for every age and nationality, rich and poor alike. But my father has no time. I skip to keep up with him as he strides to work. He walks briskly, never stopping to gaze in shop windows, and I have a hard time catching all the sights and sounds of rush hour. A tall clown dressed in polka dots and floppy shoes hands out free doughnuts as promotion for a new savings bank on 42d Street. A businessman who smells of bacon and eggs brushes me as he passes and knocks my straw hat off. The blind Viking, Moondog, sings his songs outside the U.S. Post Office, and across the street a tattered bag lady pleads for spare change. Why are some people fed so well and others not at all? What makes us so lucky and them so poor? My father pushes on, not answering. He’s in a hurry to get to work. He’s chief of the Visitor’s Bureau, and it’s his job to brief the tour guides every morning.
Across the outdoor plaza we race, through the revolving doors, and into the great hall of the General Assembly Building. The suspended model of the Sputnik was a gift from the Soviet Union, the wall of nickel-plated windows from Canada. By my eighth birthday I know most of the tour by heart, but I never tire of coming here. In my father’s basement office we separate. He leaves me to the care of secretaries and guides, and spins into his official day. Perhaps we’ll meet for lunch in the Delegate’s Dining Room or the Press Club in the Secretariat, but most likely we won’t see each other again until it’s time to go home. The women in the office don’t mind. They ooh and aah over this sweet little tike in smocked dress and patent leather shoes, the boss’s daughter come to spend a day playing international affairs. As for me, there’s more than enough to keep me entertained, never mind my father’s laissez-faire attitude. The guides whisk me like a VIP through security and down corridors closed to the general public. I sit in on meetings of ECOSOC and the Trusteeship Council, listen to debates about nuclear warfare in the Security Council. Utter strangers marvel at me. They think I’m terribly precocious. I do my best to act the part, and when my father greets me at the end of the day I make sure he gets a fine report on my conduct. He acts proud at that, and boasts that I will one day bloom as a lady ambassador.
But the cosmopolitan light in my eye fades quickly with return to Glenridge. In the confines of my own home I can’t fake precocity. At dinner I politely remain at table long after finishing my meal and listen as my parents dissect the state of the nation and world. They wage nightly warfare over political points of view and the meaning of presidential appointments. They fight with such intensity that I, ignorant of the issues, hear hatred in their voices and believe each meal to be their last together.
Things may start off peacefully. My brother and I help my mother set the table while Dad drinks a whiskey and soda and plods on through the newspaper (a never-ending occupation). Scott tickles me, sends me into gales of laughter, until my mother commands him to stop and slice the bread for supper. The three of us chatter about the day’s activities, and when the meal is ready my father joins us.
Things quiet down as Dad carves the meat and apportions the vegetables. He tells my mother that Haile Selassie today addressed the General Assembly. There’s trouble with the mercenaries fighting in the Congo. The border disputes continue in the Middle East. Viet Nam looks bleaker by the day. Gulping forkfuls of rice pilaf, I swim through the conversation like a minnow in a stream of wine. It makes me feel giddy, all this talk above my head, but also slightly ill at ease. Is there nothing here for me to latch onto, nothing that I can understand? I want to participate, or at least to learn, but the issues and answers flow faster and faster, leaving me far behind. My mother, an idealistic liberal, cries for the abolition of colonialism and defends nonviolent protest. She condemns the South African government’s apartheid system and launches into sweeping comparisons of despotic regimes around the world. The more she talks the louder and faster and more insistent she becomes. Dad closes up again when Mom begins to speak. You can see by the way he eats that she annoys him. He attacks his meal not with relish or gusto, but with a predatory need. He macerates his potato, green beans, and squash, and drowns them in thick brown gravy. He fastidiously picks the meat from bones, even taking them in his fingers and gnawing them clean. And when the food is finished he pulls a large hunk of bread across his plate to sop up any remains. The more elaborate Mom’s rant, the more fiercely Dad eats. He never interrupts, but he keeps time with her fury through the tempo of his knife and fork. Only at the end of her tirade, and when he has sated himself, will he comment on her theories. Almost always he finds fault with them. She accuses him of criticizing her intelligence. He hurls facts and figures at her to substantiate his claims. She damns his photographic memory and screams for imagination. He calmly informs her that she is wrong, that no theory can succeed without accurate information to back it up, and that she inevitably forms opinions without knowing the facts. And so the seesaw snaps. Mom thunders off to the back of the house, slamming doors and breaking dishes as she goes. Dad takes wordless refuge in his study, where he pores over piles of tax forms and bills. Scott drifts to the living room to watch Palladin, and I stumble off to my room to cry.