Free Fiction Ruined My Family by Jeanne Darst Page A

only person in the family who had time to write back, so we became pen pals. He was thrilled. My father thought I should compile all of my letters home and call them Letters from a Mad Mother’s Helper . We signed off our letters with Andrews Sisters lyrics, “I sove you lo much, Dad” and “No bout a doubt it, Jean.” It was probably the first time I saw language, formally put together as opposed to just whizzed around back and forth for comic effect, as a kind of fun. It was also the first time I saw that bad life equals good art. My miserable summer left me with a pile of funny letters home and a connection to what my father did or didn’t do, a connection to him.
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    MY SENIOR YEAR in high school all my sisters were away at college. Things got particularly lonely when Julia went to college and I had to deal with Mom every night by myself. Mom’s gloom was nocturnal; it came alive at night, after about seventeen glasses of Dewar’s. When I’d pester her to perk up a little, easy on the drama, s’il vous plaît , she’d remind me, “I was born on Pearl Harbor, baby.” Which wasn’t true. She was born four days after Pearl Harbor, December 11, 1941, but if I brought up that fact she’d say, “Close enough, dearie.” She fell off a horse at thirteen and broke her arm; she fell out her bedroom window at eleven and was in a leg cast for months; she drove her Thunderbird into a ravine, God damn it, she was legally blind; she was teeny, five feet, which isn’t that much fun except when the Randy Newman song “Short People” came out, which she thought was “a riot.” (“Oh, isn’t that a riot?”) But generally things were not a riot to my mother.
    When I would call Katharine at Vassar, I’d tell her about the arguments on the front lawn, or the Sarah Lawrence professor my mother was convinced was Dad’s lover, who mom was calling, screaming, every five minutes. I might as well have been living in a Blarney Stone bar near Grand Central, considering the tenor of the place. One Monday morning Mom had just disappeared.
    â€œMom’s MIA. I think she took off to St. Croix to see Corky.” Corky was a friend of my mom’s from Villa Duchesne. “Are you reading?” I’d ask her.
    â€œNo,” she’d snap back, long used to the accusation.
    â€œIt seems like you’re reading,” I said, from the pink Princess telephone in my room, which came from my grandmother’s house in St. Louis. It still had her old exchange phone number on the front, that Hitchcockian combination of words and letters. I loved it, not because I liked pink or irony, or was sentimental, but because the ringer was broken. I could call out but was never disturbed by incoming calls in my bedroom. The perfect form of communication in my mind, a model for what I fantasized about in a romantic relationship.
    â€œI’m listening. I’m listening! I heard you. Mom’s MIA in Taos. Where’d she get the money to go to Taos?”
    â€œShe probably hocked something of Nonnie’s. St. Croix. You see you’re not listening!”
    â€œTaos. St. Croix. What’s the diff? She’ll come back eventually. With four hideous white sweatshirts with toucans on them or something and that’ll be that. I wouldn’t worry too much about it.” Sound of a page turning. A thick turn, maybe a magazine.
    She wanted to help me become, not cool because that she couldn’t help me with, but me. Only less of an asshole. Doesn’t mean she stopped reading while I poured my guts out to her, but she was there for me in some profoundly distracted way.
    Katharine was herself a pragmatic person but unlike Eleanor, she admired risk-takers, she liked ideas and literature and writers, she believed in people. She loved whatever part of them was lovable and ignored the rest of them. This was nothing