Hungry Heart Page 4
“You got off the bus,” my mother begins.
“. . . and you were reading your book,” Nanna continues. “Walking down the stairs and off the bus and reading the entire time.”
“And you got off the bus, and you were barefoot! And we asked, ‘Jenny, where are your shoes?’ ”
“And you just shrugged,” Nanna continues. “You’d managed to lose your shoes.” The two of them finish the story in harmony: “But you’d never lose your book.”
When you’re sad and lonely where you are, it only makes sense that you’d do whatever you could to get someplace else. That was what books were for—my lifeline, my oxygen when I was underwater, my escape. They gave me other worlds that I could inhabit, characters into whose skin I could slip. In book-world, I wasn’t chunky or clumsy, the girl whose overlarge vocabulary was the equivalent of a “kick me” sign taped to my back, the girl with the ugly face, the weird clothes, the complete lack of friends. I was Nancy Drew, zipping around in her roadster, solving mysteries, or Anne of Green Gables, finding her “bosom friend,” or Laura Ingalls, standing in the door of my little house on the prairie and watching Indians on horseback file solemnly by, or Meg Murry, bravely searching the universe for my missing father.
Books were a series of magic carpets, each one with the power to deliver me to another, better place. That was all I wanted—to be brave and beautiful and admired and beloved, to be somewhere other than my hometown, where no one—not my teachers, not my rabbi, not my Girl Scout leader, and definitely not my parents—seemed to notice that I was being eaten alive.
My father set the hook. Every night when I was four, he began reading me and my sister a chapter of Nancy Drew, ending each session with a cliffhanger. One afternoon, after school, only one chapter away from solving The Secret of the Old Clock, Molly and I couldn’t stand it anymore. We snuck the book out of my parents’ bedroom, where it had been waiting on the nightstand, and took it down to the basement playroom, which was the kids’ domain. The playroom was carpeted, equipped with Legos and wooden blocks, a three-note Playskool xylophone, an old couch, and an orange-and-white Fisher-Price record player that we could use to play records from The Jungle Book or Free to Be . . . You and Me. Molly and I sat down, side by side, our backs against the fake-wood paneling, and I opened The Secret of the Old Clock to my father’s bookmark, one slim wedge of pages from the book’s conclusion.
At first, the words looked like cuneiform, random slashes and squiggles. I took a deep breath. There was a story in there, I just had to figure out how to get to it. Molly peered down at the page, then up at my face. “No?” she said.
I kept staring. I knew my letters. I knew which sound each letter made, and most of the sounds in combination. I could recognize dozens of words by sight; I’d been following along with my father for weeks. “N-a-n-c-y” was “Nancy.” “Look-ed” was “looked.” “Nancy look-ed. Nancy looked at her friends.”
Molly clapped her hands with delight as the cuneiform became letters, and the letters became sounds, and the sounds became words, and the words turned into a story. I started to read, first painfully slowly, sounding out each syllable, then gaining confidence and fluency until, with my head aching and my eyes burning, we got to the end of the chapter, to the detective’s arrival and the bad guy’s arrest and Nancy’s joyful reunion with her father. Molly went racing up the stairs, out of the basement and into the kitchen, which always smelled faintly of garlic, probably because Fran kept a desiccating Hebrew National salami hanging from a nail in the doorway, shouting, “Jenny can read!” I was almost five, and the doors of the world had swung open. My imaginary life, the one that sometimes felt more real to me than the real world, had finally begun.
I started my career as a reader with my father’s medical textbooks—mostly because there were pictures of naked people in them. I was curious about boys and, other than glimpses of my brothers in the bathtub, I hadn’t seen much. Each hardcover had thick, glossy pages that smelled of formaldehyde, and each was crowded with tiny type and vivid color pictures—“Plate 1,” “Plate 2”—of various horrific rashes and lesions and tumors. I paged through the book, enthralled and horrified, until I came to pictures of a naked little boy with a black bar over his eyes and, due to some kind of pituitary tumor, the secondary sex characteristics of a grown man. I slammed the book shut at my first glimpse of the boy, and the words (“penis,” “testicles”), looking around anxiously to see if anyone was watching. When it was clear that no one was, I opened the book again and stared until my curiosity was satisfied. What I remember most was not his body hair or the adult heft and size of what he had between his legs, but how his belly curved outward, and the way he stood, slightly pigeon-toed, like every little boy I knew.
My next stop was my mother’s novels. I dipped into The Bell Jar, but had barely made it past the title page and my explanation that it was “by a very sad lady named Saliva Plath,” when my mother decided I’d have to wait a few years. She wasn’t so quick with a book called Widow, by Lynn Caine, about a woman whose husband dies of explicitly described colorectal cancer. That book gave me nightmares, as well as a lingering habit of inspecting the contents of the toilet bowl after I’d used it, certain that I’d see traces of blood and discover that I, too, was dying. I didn’t think anything between two covers could be quite as vivid or disturbing. Then I discovered Erica Jong’s How to Save Your Own Life, with its scene about a couple having uninhibited sex during the woman’s menstrual period. When you’re eight years old and you’ve read about a man chewing on a woman’s used tampon, it gives you a slightly skewed sense of the grown-up world. You start to see it as an odd, not entirely safe place, full of weird corners, strange angles, bad behavior. The adults I was meeting in books felt like oversize children, children who could (and did) have sex, but did not seem any wiser or more reasoned than the kids I knew.
I read voraciously, indiscriminately, gulping down anything that held my interest. My parents’ books were supplemented by the ones I’d borrow from my classrooms, and from my school library, and visits to the Simsbury Free Library, which had been built in 1890, a Colonial Revival–style building with a pillared entryway and imposing windows, three stories high, with a basement for the children’s section. I’d go at least once a week and come back with a brown paper grocery bag full of books—picture books, chapter books, poetry, biographies of presidents and inventors, enough to carry me through a week.
The library was just a few blocks from Belden Elementary, and maybe a mile away from Central Elementary, where I went for fourth through sixth grade. There was a path through the woods, from Central down to Belden. From there, you could follow the sidewalk down to the library. I was allowed to make the trip after school, as long as I promised to stay on the sidewalks. I would walk or skip, sometimes humming to myself, enjoying my freedom. Being at the library felt like spending time in some eccentric aunt’s book-crammed house. The periodicals and nonfiction were on the first floor, fiction was on the second, and there was a young adult section in the small, cramped attic—two rooms, a few tables, the spicy smell of ink and old paper, walls lined with bookshelves, and spinning wire stands of paperbacks stuck wherever there was space.
I read The Citadel by A. J. Cronin, and A Child’s History of the World by V. M. Hillyer. I devoured Judy Blume’s work, especially the library’s single, dog-eared, passed-around copy of Forever . . . that made the rounds through the Henry James cafeteria and would fall open immediately to the sex scenes. When I was twelve, I found Stephen King’s short-story collection Night Shift in the library—this was the paperback with the eyeball-covered hand on its front cover—and made the mistake of reading it during a babysitting gig after the kids were asleep. It left me so terrified that I sprinted the entire length of the street back home.
I read for entertainment and I read for knowledge and for previews of coming attractions. (Boys! Sex! Babies! Divorce! Feminist awakenings! And that was just the first three chapters of
The Women’s Room.) I read Ancient Evenings and The Persian Boy and Lace, by Shirley Conran, a racy book about three best friends and the sexual adventures they had in boarding school, a book that spawned an eventual miniseries that I wasn’t allowed to see. I read Isaac Bashevis Singer and Portnoy’s Complaint, which gave me an excellent reason to eschew liver on the rare occasions that my mother prepared it. My neighbor Rosanne McFarland’s mom was into Harlequins, and I would take three or four home and read them, one after the other, and fall asleep dreaming of the prince who would someday come, in the guise of a lonely cowboy or a widowed surgeon or a wounded war hero whom I’d patiently nurse back to health.
I read kids’ books, too, Shel Silverstein and the All-of-a-Kind Family, all the Ramona and Beezus books, the Great Brain and Encyclopedia Brown and Roald Dahl—first everything he wrote for children, then the grotesque and twisty stories he wrote for adults. I had a taste for the dark stuff, and there was plenty of it to find. My father had given me a hardcover book, a collection of short stories called something like Eerie Tales. There were classics like “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Most Dangerous Game,” and one of Dahl’s lesser-known stories, “Man from the South.” In that one, a hard-core gambler staying at a luxury resort overhears a soldier casually bragging about the excellence of his cigarette lighter. In his accented, sibilant English, the gambler proposes a bet: If the soldier can strike a flame ten times in a row, he’ll give him a brand-new Cadillac. If he fails, he’ll collect the man’s little finger. The soldier accepts, even though his girlfriend begs him not to. As a crowd gathers, and as our narrator is recruited to count each flick, the soldier thumbs the wheel of the lighter and sparks a flame once . . . twice . . . three times. I think he gets all the way to nine before the gambler’s wife storms into the room, grabbing her husband and shaking him, berating him in some foreign language. While the gambler stands, shamefaced, his wife explains to the stunned crowd that the Cadillac wasn’t even the man’s to bet with. It was hers. “I took everything,” she said. “It took me a long, long time, but I got it all in the end.” When the unnamed narrator shakes the wife’s hand, he notices that it feels very strange . . . then he looks down and sees that she has only her index finger and her thumb.
That was a long way from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Except that book, too, had a kind of underlying savagery that I, and presumably other children readers, accepted without question. In the books I loved, people were poor, teachers were cruel, fathers lost their jobs, parents died and their children were adopted by horrible, hateful great-aunts who were horrible and hateful just because they disliked children. In one of the Great Brain books, a Jewish merchant starves to death because the Mormons in town don’t patronize his business and he’s too proud to let them know that he can no longer buy food. The Grimm’s Fairy Tales that my father read from wasn’t the redacted, Disneyfied collection of stories, with wasp-waisted, doe-eyed girls drifting about and singing “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes” while mice and little birds made their beds. In my version, Cinderella’s stepsisters hacked off their heels and sliced away their toes to try to cram their bloody feet into the glass slipper—and then they had their eyes pecked out by Cinderella’s loyal bird companions after they’d failed. When the miller’s daughter guessed Rumpelstiltskin’s name, he flew into a rage that ended only after he tore himself in half, and when the Little Mermaid got her prince and her legs and what was between them, not only did she lose her voice, but with every step she took she felt like she was walking on knives.
This all confirmed my understanding of how things worked. Other kids were mean. They would hate you if you wore the wrong clothes, if you celebrated the wrong holidays, if you looked or sounded different, and the grown-ups either didn’t see or didn’t care.
This vision of the world also fit in with what I saw at home, where all of us tiptoed over the thin ice that lay atop the roiling black water of my father’s temper. Anything could set him off—a wet towel on the floor, a bicycle dumped on its side in the garage instead of parked neatly, a smart mouth, a scrape or bump, real or imagined, of his new Corvette, this one a red 1984 version. In the garage at Harvest Hill Road, he strung old couch cushions together, forming a makeshift bumper that encircled the car. He loved his Corvette unconditionally. As for the rest of us, he loved us when we performed—when Jake scored goals for his soccer team, when I got perfect scores on my tests. When we’d fail to meet his expectations—when we misbehaved or broke the rules or, worst of all, when we embarrassed him—he’d be cold and scornful, dismissive and cruel, the opposite of the gentle, loving father who’d read us stories every night when we were little.
When I was ten, I tried out for and made our town’s travel soccer team, much to my parents’ astonishment, and my own. I wasn’t a very good player—not fast, not coordinated, definitely not liked by my teammates—but I must have had a very good day at the tryouts. At a home game, when I was playing fullback, an opponent fired a shot at the goal. I intercepted it and tried to kick it forward, but the ball spun and bounced backward off my ankle, past our goalie, and into the goal.
“She scored for the WRONG TEAM!” I heard one of my teammates say. People were laughing. Our coach was shaking her head. On the sidelines, my father was staring, not at me, but through me, as if I’d suddenly become invisible. In the car, on the way home, I cried and said, “I want to quit the team.” He stared straight ahead and said, “Maybe you should.”
If he’d been that way all the time, I would have known to avoid him. But sometimes he’d be the father I remembered, the one who’d encouraged me to read, the one who’d say tersely, “Proud of you” when I brought home those good grades, or who’d introduce me to his secretary and his colleagues and beam as he said, “This is Jenny, my oldest.”
There was no predictability, no way of knowing which father you’d get, a suburban version of “The Lady, or the Tiger?” Every night we’d hear the garage door go up and listen to the Corvette rumble to a stop. The door to the house from the garage would open. He’d set down his briefcase and stand there in the hallway. His suit and tie would be as pristine as they’d been when he’d left, shoes polished to a high gloss, watch and wedding ring shining, and the five of us—my mother in the kitchen, the kids upstairs or in the family room watching The Electric Company—would hold our breath. Would he smile, dance into the kitchen, reach for my mother and enfold her in a hug? Or would there be a chilly silence as he swept us with his gaze, his expression stony, his posture defeated, like a man who’d expected to check into a five-star hotel and instead found himself in a squalid shack full of kids and noise and mess?
Home made no sense. Books were much better, even the ones that affirmed the world’s darkness . . . but some of the ones I loved the best offered not confirmation but the fantasy of escape.
• • •
When I was twelve, I found Judith Krantz’s sex-and-shopping sagas and became an instant devotee of her stories about beautiful movie stars and the dashing descendants of Russian czars who loved them (Princess Daisy), or three generations of stunning models-turned-businesswomen and the famous artist who loved them (Mistral’s Daughter). In Krantz’s world, being unhappy in high school meant only that, within a chapter or two, you’d start taking flying lessons, and fall in love with your older, dashing war-hero instructor . . . and being overweight and unlovely meant only that transformation was imminent.
My favorite Judith Krantz book, then and now, is Scruples, a fable of an ugly duckling who blossoms into a beautiful, extremely wealthy, and sexually satisfied swan. For the unenlightened, Scruples, and its sequel, Scruples Two, tells the story of Wilhelmina Hunnenwell Winthrop Ikehorn Orsini Elliot, always called Billy, who grew up heavy and lonely, shunned by her wealthy Bostonian peers in a way that felt, to me, devastatingly familiar. I had soccer-team humiliation; Billy had dance class, where, in a fit of nerves and shame, she threw up on herself, and her all-wrong shiny blue satin dress. My physician fathe
r could be mean and cold; Billy’s research-scientist father barely knew she existed. Both of us ate to stuff the pain down, and for the pleasure food gave us, neither of us could connect with our classmates. After high school, Billy gathered her courage and a small inheritance from an eccentric aunt and went to Paris. There she perfected her French and dropped ninety pounds (you know it’s fiction when a girl goes to Paris and loses weight). She had unsatisfying sex with her first boyfriend, figured out how to have satisfying sex all by herself, and returned to America to begin her conquest of the world, driven by, among other things, a desire to show up all those snotty Boston girls who’d shunned her.
I’d been entertained, even engrossed by leading ladies before, but Billy felt personal. I saw myself when I read about Billy in her boarding-school kitchen, gobbling bowls of Cream of Wheat topped with butter and brown sugar. I identified completely with her descriptions of how it felt when you know people are talking about you, laughing behind your back. More than that, I recognized Billy’s drive, her desire to prove to the world that she mattered. I read, turning the pages breathlessly, on my single bed, in my no-brand jeans and too-tight shirts, smelling like Designer Knockoff Versace, as Billy shed her weight and acquired a chic Parisian wardrobe, a secretarial degree, a loyal best friend, and a handsome, much-older billionaire husband, who died with convenient alacrity, leaving Billy still young, newly single, extremely wealthy, and perfectly positioned to take over the world.
I wanted to be Billy. I didn’t have Billy’s discipline, her willingness to subsist on poached fish and steamed vegetables, to eschew chocolate by pretending it was poop. Was a happy ending possible if you didn’t get thin? Could you reap Billy Ikehorn Orsini–level rewards even if you stayed a size fourteen, even if you couldn’t find a single prom dress to zip up over your bosom, even if all of the popular boys in your high school class were short and skinny, cute instead of handsome, and you felt like the Jewish Jolly Green Giant on the rare occasions you ever stood anywhere near them?