Hungry Heart Read online

  The light kept me from sleeping. The smoke was even worse. It curled through the window screen, the acrid stink filling first our bedroom, then the hallway, then the whole upstairs. “Turn off the light, please!” I’d call, and he’d snarl something back at me, something about how it was his house and unless I cared to pay the mortgage he could do whatever he wanted. My youngest brother would cry. He was just seven, mid-indoctrination about the Evils of Smoking; he’d been shown the pictures of necrotic tissue and people dying of lung cancer. “Please don’t smoke!” Joe would beg him. I don’t remember what my father said back.

  By the time my mother and I got home, I was ready for him to be gone. I was already planning how I’d frame this new stage of my life, what I would tell my friends, and whether I would, or would not, accept their sympathy. Should I be strong and stoic? Weepy and broken?

  When we pulled down the pebbled driveway, though, his red Corvette was still in the garage, and my father was in the bedroom, with a suitcase open on the bed, pairing black socks and then folding them into bundles. He’d started wearing a pinkie ring the year before, a heavy Roman coin set in gold, and I remember that it gleamed in the light as he reached past my mother and shut the door.

  • • •

  The first time my father filed for bankruptcy was in 1988, when I was eighteen and home for my first summer from college. This was two years after he’d left with the words “I don’t want you to think of me as a father. Think of me as more of an uncle.”

  We got the message. He was lighting out for the territories, to have adventures, to find the fun he’d been denied. We were all familiar with his complaint, how he’d say, “I never got to have a childhood,” how he’d remind us of the presidents he’d memorized as a kid; how he’d been pushed to excel, to achieve, since he was old enough to read. He’d grown up laboring under the expectation that not only would he be the first in his family to attend college, but he’d also get an advanced degree and be a professional, a doctor or a lawyer, securing his spot in respectable upper-middle-class America. My father’s parents, my mother’s parents, everyone in the generation of Jews who had lived through the Holocaust knew that almost anything of worth could be taken from you—your home, your jewelry, your heirlooms—but no one could ever take your education.

  • • •

  My father wasn’t a traditionally handsome man. His face was dominated by his nose, his curly black beard covered pockmarked, pale skin, and his most common expression was a skeptical scowl . . . but, resplendent in the tailored suits and glossy silk ties that he wore for work, with his slim leather briefcase at his side and his reputation as one of the best child psychiatrists in Hartford, he had a certain allure, especially to all the single ladies, the educators and the social workers and doctors and lawyers he met on the job.

  By the summer of 1988, as far as my siblings and my mother were concerned, my father existed as a collage of red-bordered envelopes, creditors’ calls, and our own conversations and guesses. We didn’t see him, didn’t even know where he was living, but we could trace his movements through the bills and come-ons that kept arriving in our mailbox: invitations to join frequent-visitor clubs at hotels in Saratoga and casinos in Atlantic City, postcards from jewelry stores and art galleries thanking him for his business. My parents weren’t officially divorced then, just separated, so there were no legal orders in place for alimony and child support . . . just what my father had promised: Of course I’ll take care of you.

  But he didn’t. Small stuff—clothes, groceries, gifts for birthday parties—went on my mother’s credit card. Big things meant panic. When our refrigerator gave out, my mom had to ask her mom for money to replace it. My father went off and got to have the life he’d wanted, the fun he’d missed, travel and glamour and glamorous traveling companions. We got the bills. It was as if, like his long-dead contractor father, he’d hefted his own sledgehammer and sent it smashing down, but instead of shattering a countertop or a tiled floor, what he broke was our life; the illusion of us as a happy, normal family, the idea that he’d loved us or valued us enough to stick around.

  • • •

  The creditors’ letters came first, sounding as if someone had translated the text from English into some obscure language with a spiky and difficult grammar, and then translated it back again.

  “Your obligations to this creditor are seriously delinquent.”

  “This letter will serve as formal demand for payment of amounts owed to my client.”

  “Please be advised,” they would say, and “We are confident that you would like to resolve this matter now.”

  As things progressed and no payments arrived, the letters’ tone would shift, becoming first passive-aggressive, then simply aggressive. “Frankly, we would like to know if you intend to pay this,” wrote American Express Travel. “If your answer is ‘yes,’ please fill in the space below, and we will both feel better. But do it now! Courtesy costs so little: means so much.”

  Eventually, the niceties would be abandoned, and the missives would be written in shouty caps-lock: “YOUR FAILURE TO RESPOND TO OUR PREVIOUS REQUESTS HAS CONSTRAINED US TO REFER YOUR ACCOUNT TO OUR LEGAL DEPARTMENT FOR REVIEW. IF IT IS DETERMINED THAT YOU ARE A CANDIDATE FOR LEGAL PROCEDURES TO RECOVER THE AMOUNT DUE, YOU MAY BE REQUIRED TO PAY ALL COLLECTION COSTS TOGETHER WITH ANY INTEREST, AS ALLOWED BY CONTRACT OR LAW. TO AVOID THIS UNPLEASANT OCCURRENCE, UPON RECEIPT OF THIS NOTICE, PLEASE CONTACT THIS OFFICE TOLL-FREE.”

  My father owed money to American Express and Citibank and Barclays, to the mechanic who cared for his cars and the garage that housed them, to a storage facility and to the car-phone company and a half dozen department stores. Instead of paying the bills he filed for bankruptcy, hiring lawyers to represent him. He didn’t pay them, either, and eventually their firms would send collection letters of their own.

  The letters didn’t work. They couldn’t—my father wasn’t there to receive them, we didn’t know where to send them, and if we had known where to contact our father, we would have probably asked him to take care of his obligations to us before paying anyone else.

  • • •

  By that summer, the phone calls began, starting at seven in the morning, ending at ten or even eleven o’clock at night, sometimes after I’d fallen asleep. The white kitchen phone, bolted to the wall above the desk where my mother kept her address book and paid the bills, would ring, or the cordless phone we’d carry to the pool, or into the family room, would shrill.

  “Is Doctor Weener there?” or “Let me speak to your father,” the voice on the other end of the line would say, mispronouncing our last name with malicious, sneering glee. Sometimes the voices belonged to men, and sometimes to women, but that tone—nagging, exhausted, bossy, aggrieved—was always the same.

  “He isn’t here,” I—or my brother Jake, or my sister, Molly, would respond. “He doesn’t live here anymore.”

  That summer, we would say those words over and over and over again—we don’t know where he is, he doesn’t live here anymore. It felt like punishment; like being forced over and over to admit our own failings.

  “This is the number I have for him,” the voice would say. Or “I know he’s there.” Or sometimes “I’m going to call your neighbors.” There’d be a pause, a rustling of pages. “I’m calling the Chamberlains, and asking if his car’s in the driveway.” The Chamberlains, whose children were teenagers and young adults, lived next door, and rarely even said hello; the Efkins, an older couple with no kids, were our other next-door neighbors, and were friendly. The creditors’ failure to pronounce “Efkin” correctly was one of the many things we tried to laugh about that summer. “Eefkin!” Joe would say, shaking his head. “Eefkin!” “Efkin” wasn’t a hard name, which meant that the creditors were dummies, not as smart as we were, not as smart as my father, either, or they’d be able to track him down.

  He’s not here, we would say. No, we don’t have another number. No, we don’t know where he is.


  “No, no, I don’t want to talk to you,” one of the collectors, this one male, yelled at me when I answered the phone at ten-thirty p.m. I was going to tell him off for calling that late, to tell him that some of us were trying to sleep because some of us had jobs, but he started in on me first. “Put your father on the phone.”

  “He isn’t here,” I said again, my voice high and stubborn, and the man made a rude noise and hung up.

  “You’re lying,” one of the agents said to my brother Joe, who was eleven at the time. “Didn’t anyone teach you that it’s wrong to lie?” Joe hung up the phone and, tight-lipped, white-faced, walked out of the family room, up the stairs, and into his bedroom and locked his door. He didn’t leave for eighteen hours, not even after we knocked and told him that he hadn’t done anything wrong, that this would all, somehow, be fine.

  • • •

  Thanks to the women’s studies course I’d taken my freshman spring, I came home that summer determined to reject the gendered norms of the workplace. No traditionally female, pink-collar ghetto for me, no taking care of children or waitressing or answering some man’s phone. Instead, I took a job at a landscaping company, a move that would both destabilize the patriarchy and possibly result in noticeable weight loss and a killer tan.

  From seven in the morning until four in the afternoon, in my bright yellow T-shirt, khaki pants, a baseball cap, and steel-toed work boots, I pushed a giant power mower across the wide, sloping lawns of the companies whose corporate offices lined the Berlin Turnpike. I drove the truck, filled the mowers’ tanks with gas, gulped quarts of Gatorade and ice water from the cooler in the back of the truck as the temperature rose past ninety every afternoon. My palms blistered from the vibrating metal handle of the mower. I did, indeed, get very tan but did not, alas, get thin. I saved every paycheck, forty hours a week times seven dollars an hour, knowing I’d need the money to pay for shoes and clothes and textbooks, which were frighteningly expensive.

  Molly, who was starting her senior year of high school in September, scooped ice cream at Friendly’s on Route 44. This was ironic, given that my sister was then, and still remains, only selectively friendly. That summer, she served up some truly disturbing Cone Head sundaes to the children of happier families, whose dinners weren’t interrupted by the blast of the telephone, the beep and hiss of the answering machine.

  Joe went away to sleepaway camp for two weeks, the longest respite my mother could afford, and Jake caddied at a country club, carrying golf bags, making small talk with the fathers of his friends who belonged there. How’s your dad? they’d ask, and Jake, the most socially adroit of the four of us, had figured out how to say He’s fine in a way that precluded additional questions.

  My mother had gone back to work a few years previously, after Joe had started school full-time. Like the rest of us, she had summers off. She swam. If she was home, she was in the water, churning out endless laps of the crawl, back and forth like a metronome, punctuating the still summer air with the splash of her stroking arm coming down, the flap of her swim skirt as she flipped. You couldn’t hear the phone underwater. Even if you could, you’d never have to be the one to answer.

  “Is Mister Weener there?” At some point, my father had stopped being a doctor. “No, honey, I don’t want to talk to you,” they’d say over and over again when I’d give my explanation, when I’d ask if I could help them instead. “Put your father on the phone.”

  When September came, I couldn’t get back to school fast enough. My boyfriend, the older brother of a high school friend whom I’d been dating for two years, drove me to campus, and I stood in line to register for classes and collect the keys to my dorm room. When I got to the front, the woman peered at the ledger in front of her, then looked up at me, then left to have a whispered conversation with her supervisor before directing me to the bursar’s office. Registration was at one end of campus. The bursar’s office, where I’d never been, was all the way at the other. I walked uphill, along the slate paths, under the leafy green trees, head bent, listening to my classmates greeting one another, exchanging hugs and backslaps and asking how the summer had been. Oh, we were in the Hamptons . . . I was in Italy, with my parents . . . San Francisco, with my dad, such a bore. My hands were still callused. I kept them in my pockets and presented myself to a smiling woman behind a desk, who directed me upstairs to an unsmiling man in an office, who told me that I wouldn’t be allowed to attend classes, because no one had sent a tuition check. “Do you know how to reach your father?” I remember him asking. His office was flooded with late-morning light that made the floorboards glow like honey. His desk had spindly wooden legs, and his ebony-painted chair had the university’s crest on the headrest, picked out in gold paint. Ivy edged along the panes of his window overlooking the quad. I shook my head, reciting the lines I’d said all summer. We don’t have another number for him. We don’t know where he lives. I wondered if I could go home, get my landscaping job back, rake leaves until it got cold, then learn how to run a snowblower and a plow. I’d get friends to send me the curriculum and the reading lists; I’d be an autodidact, and write my first novel before I turned twenty-five, and I’d sell it for a seven-figure advance, and wouldn’t the school, and my father, be sorry then?

  • • •

  I’d never thought much about money before that summer and fall. My father was a successful physician; my mom worked as a substitute teacher, but was mostly home with us. When I was growing up, we’d never once gotten a call from a creditor; I’d never seen a bill marked LAST NOTICE in the mail. Money—for trips to Michigan or Florida, for a pair of used skis or hockey skates from Play It Again Sports, for school supplies, for pets and vets and doctor’s visits—had always been there, the way there was water when you turned on a tap, or heat when you adjusted the thermostat, a steady, reliable presence. Even if my parents were loath to spring for the designer clothes I’d craved as a teen, we’d never not had money, and I’d never given much thought to my relationship with it, or how much it could matter. That fall—maybe even that moment, in the bursar’s office—was when I decided that I was going to be rich; that I’d earn myself, somehow, a big, giant pile of cash. I didn’t lust for things, didn’t imagine myself draped in diamonds, wrapped in furs, or opening the doors of my mansion to the cameras of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. I wanted security. I never wanted to get pulled out of another line, or receive a single red-bordered envelope in my mailbox, or feel that sense of dread and misery when the phone rang. I wanted to never worry, to never feel attacked or insecure, worthless or unwanted, and I believed—foolishly, incorrectly, with a heartbreaking youthful naiveté—that money meant I never would.

  • • •

  My mother tried to explain to the financial officers that my father had promised to pay my tuition. They were sympathetic but unmoved. Whatever he’d said didn’t matter, nor did the bankruptcy case. Both of my parents had signed the documents promising to pay my tuition. Eventually, my mother and I took out loans for thirty thousand dollars to cover my last two years, loans we’d repay at a rate of three hundred dollars per month for, I think, the next twenty years.

  For the rest of my time at Princeton, it felt like I was stuck in that same head-down, hands-in-my-pockets hurry, like I was racing through campus, and toward the finish line of my degree, knowing that I could get a call, or a red-bordered letter of my own, in my box in the campus mailroom. No, we don’t want you. Where’s your father? Let us talk to him!

  The next summer, I had an internship at the Fund for the Feminist Majority in Washington, DC. The internship was unpaid, but I had a plan—if I worked two weeks of twelve-hour days at Princeton’s reunions, I would make enough to support myself during the internship, and have enough left over for books in the fall.

  The problem was, my internship started before my check from Princeton arrived. After three days in Washington, during which I’d gotten myself settled in my dorm at American University and figured out how to t
ake the Metro to work, I was down to my last five dollars. I’d bought a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter, but when that ran out I didn’t know what I was going to do. I called Fran, and asked if she could loan me a hundred dollars, just until my check arrived.

  She turned me down. “You should just ask for an advance on your paycheck,” she instructed.

  “Fran,” I said, trying not to panic. “It’s an unpaid internship. There is no paycheck.”

  “I’m sure if you explain to your boss what’s going on, and ask her to lend you some money, you can pay her back when your check gets there.”

  Of course, I was way too embarrassed to ask my boss, who’d once run the National Organization for Women, to lend me money. Instead, I found a CVS that would accept the credit card I’d gotten, in my own name, used once, then panicked when the $80 bill arrived and vowed never to use again. I bought cold cuts and canned soup and got a second, paying job at a coffee shop in Arlington. I turned down invitations to museums, skipped a trip to the movies, and, with my fellow interns, found a bar that had a spread of dips and vegetables, crackers and cheese, available for free during happy hour. I’d try not to notice the waitress’s scowl as I’d load, and then refill, my tiny plate, trying to eat enough to stay full until breakfast.

  When I tell that story now, and ask my mother (in a tone I try not to make too accusatory) why she couldn’t have just sent me some money—even twenty dollars!—she replies, very calmly, “I probably didn’t have it to spare.” I think, of course, that if it was one of my girls asking for money, I would have found a way to get her some, even if I can recognize that my mother’s refusal gave me the gifts of resilience and self-confidence, of knowing that whatever went wrong, I could count on myself to find a way out.