Golden Girl(27)

Vivi didn’t know her father could sing! How and when did he learn the harmonies, the lyrics? This is the first time Vivi thinks of her father as a person, someone who has talents and interests of his own.

Vivi’s mother is deeply, almost painfully religious; her idea of interior decorating is to hang up as many crucifixes as possible. She’s the head secretary at the church rectory; she’s on a first-name basis with the priests and knows the business of all of the parishioners. Everyone calls her a saint—she organizes the canned-food drives, the clothing drives, the relief for the famine in Ethiopia. She ministers to the sick and the elderly when the priests are busy; she volunteers at the battered women’s shelter. She runs the soup kitchen and leads the women’s Bible study.

Only Vivi and her father know that Nancy isn’t a saint. At home, she’s dictatorial and impatient. It’s her way or the highway. Nancy Howe is in a constant battle with her weight, and Vivi and Frank are casualties, even though they’re both thin as rails. If Nancy is on a diet (which she always is), Vivi and Frank are on a diet. They eat bizarre and awful dishes like lasagna made with cottage cheese, dry-broiled fish fillets, sugar-free cake. They say grace before dinner, holding hands; Vivi’s mother goes on and on for full minutes while dinner grows cold.

Nancy smokes like a chimney, though always outside in the garage. Everyone is allowed one vice, she says. This is the only thing that lets Vivi know her mother is human.

On Saturday mornings, Vivi and her father go to the Perkins in Middleburg Heights for breakfast while her mother works at the soup kitchen or picks up floral arrangements for the weekend services. Both Vivi and her father look forward to these breakfasts all week. They always sit in the same hunter-green vinyl booth and have the same waitress, Cindy, who has a high ponytail and wears bright pink lipstick. “It wouldn’t be Saturday without my two favorite customers,” Cindy always says. “Coffee?”

Yes, Vivi is allowed to drink coffee at these breakfasts. Cindy brings Vivi her own silver pitcher of cream and the sugar dispenser. Then Vivi and Frank pore over the huge laminated menu and order whatever they want: scrambled eggs and bacon and sausage or hash browns and lightly buttered rye toast that comes with little packets of jelly or pancakes that have a fluffy dollop of butter on top or waffles with strawberries and whipped cream or French toast sprinkled with powdered sugar or omelets oozing with cheese and soft brown onions and tomato and green pepper. Frank brings the Plain Dealer and he gives Vivi a section to read, which makes her feel grown up and also keeps her from eating too fast. They savor not only the food but the freedom from Vivi’s mother’s rules and regulations, her diets and diatribes. The real grace that Vivi experiences growing up are these stolen hours in a chain restaurant sitting across from her father as they scrape the syrup off their plates with the backs of their forks and Frank winks at his daughter and slides two quarters across the table so Vivi can go buy her horoscope from the vending machine in the breezeway while he pays their bill and leaves Cindy a tip.

At seventeen years old, Vivi can’t understand why her father would kill himself, so she assumes that, like the barbershop quartet, he had been keeping some things secret. Had he been fired? (No.) Had he been in financial trouble? (No, although because he committed suicide, the life-insurance policy is null and void, and Vivi and her mother have lost their main breadwinner.) Did he have a lover? (This doesn’t seem likely, though Vivi wonders about their waitress Cindy, because she’s the only other woman Vivi saw her father interact with on a regular basis.)

What can Vivi do but blame the only person left, her mother? Nancy Howe is responsible for Frank’s suicide because she made their lives so cheerless and dull.

There are bitter fights in the days that follow Frank Howe’s death. One starts when Vivi overhears her mother telling someone on the phone that by killing himself, Frank had “chosen to spend eternity in hell.”

“How dare you!” Vivi screams once her mother hangs up. “My father is not in hell!”

Nancy Howe’s expression remains unchanged as she lights a cigarette; now that Frank is dead, she has started smoking in the house. “He committed a cardinal sin.” She exhales. “I don’t make the rules, Vivian Rose. God does.”



Vivi has a boyfriend named Brett Caspian. They started dating back in September, right as senior year began. They’re a bit of an odd couple because Vivi is a “goody-two-shoes”; she takes honors classes and she’s the editor of the school literary magazine. Brett Caspian is a “druggie.” He has long, feathered hair; he wears flannel shirts and jeans and clunky Timberland boots; he smokes and is the lead singer and guitarist for a band called Escape from Ohio. Escape from Ohio plays at all the high-school beer parties, and although Vivi rarely goes to the beer parties—she’s usually home studying—she has been to one or two and thinks the band is pretty good.

The second week of school, Vivi is chosen to attend a fiction-writing workshop given by a Famous Author over at Normandy High. The three-day workshop is transformative. Vivi is something of a shining star, singled out by the Famous Author for her short story about an overweight housewife who thinks her husband is having an affair only to discover that he’s been singing in a barbershop quartet.

The only problem with the three-day workshop is that Vivi has missed three days of her regular classes—AP European history, AP physics, and AP calculus.