Inside Out(6)

It was a solid sales pitch. She presented her new plan as perfectly reasonable and already settled, with no acknowledgment that her kids might experience some pain or fear or confusion about their parents splitting up. Partly, this was because she was too caught up in her fantasy to consider our feelings, but I also wonder if, at some level, she knew this was nowhere near the end of her relationship with my dad.

Roger was a tall, sandy-haired guy with blue eyes and wire-rimmed glasses who had grown up in Northern California. Clearly, he was not a therapist who subscribed to a professional code of ethics. It’s heartbreaking when you consider that my mother went to him trying to find help: she saw him as the answer to all her problems, a sober, educated man who could put her on a different path. Instead, she found one more guy to complicate her life. He prescribed her uppers and downers, and I doubt she was following the recommended dosage. The pills, along with the alcohol she drank to wash them down, made her more unpredictable than ever.

My parents started going through the motions of splitting up. My mother moved in with Roger, and we alternated between staying with her at the hotel and with my dad at the apartment. A few weeks later, he told us we were going on a road trip. Off we went to Ohio, to visit my aunt and uncle in Toledo. Only he didn’t tell my mom. From her perspective, we had all just vanished. (I can only imagine the powerlessness and raw panic she must have felt.) Dad told our relatives that she had abandoned us for Roger without a word, that he had no idea how to reach her, and they believed him. Morgan and I were so accustomed to things not adding up that I don’t know if we even bothered to question the situation, or wonder why Ginny wasn’t calling and checking in on us. In any case, we were distracted: my aunt and uncle took us with their kids on a road trip to the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. For me the main attraction was Minnie Pearl, who had, always, a price tag dangling from her hat.

None of this would fly now, of course, in the age of cell phones, Instagram, email, and FaceTime, but it was easy to disappear in the seventies. My dad had made it something of a specialty. When we were in one place long enough for bills to start showing up at the door, he would write “deceased” next to his name on the envelope and take it back to the post office. I remember a microwave he bought from Sears—when microwaves seemed like a miraculous invention—that he made Morgan sign for when the deliveryman brought it to our house. My dad then told Sears he wouldn’t pay for it because a child’s signature wasn’t legally binding. He stiffed stores for all kinds of things with schemes like that; he was a creative guy. If either one of my parents had ever applied their intelligence to something constructive, I honestly believe they could have been highly successful. They had the brains, they just didn’t have the tools to pursue a positive path. And so much of their energy was focused on self-sabotage, or on sabotaging each other—I think we treat the people we love the way we believe, in our deepest hearts, that we deserve to be treated ourselves.

That summer in Toledo, my dad had no idea how to be alone with us. I had always felt connected to him, but he was so withdrawn by this point that it was impossible to feel close. He loved us, sure. But he hadn’t kidnapped us because he was determined to spend quality time with his children or because he was genuinely afraid Ginny would take us to California and he’d never see us again. I think our time in Ohio was just one extended power play in my parents’ never-ending love-hate struggle—and I suppose he won that particular round. Because somehow, by the end of the summer, he’d convinced my mom to forgive him for kidnapping her children, and we headed back to Pennsylvania so they could give it another shot.

Everything was going to be different. We were—of course—going to move, to a bigger house in another town in Pennsylvania called Charleroi, thirty miles outside of Pittsburgh. It was a step up on every level. A spacious, modern house painted avocado green, with high ceilings and shiny new appliances that my mother loved. The plumbing needed work, but Dad was good at that: he blew cigarette smoke through the pipes and had Morgan sit up in the bathroom and yell down to tell him which was the hot tap and which was the cold based on where the smoke came out.

Of all the places we lived, I think that house most closely matched my mom’s fantasy of what life should look like. Unlike her mother, Ginny’s aspirations early on were conventional: she wanted to be a beautiful wife and mother who was adored by her husband and had a nice home. And she had made nice homes for us, everywhere we went. She had a knack for decorating; she managed to whip each house we lived in into shape almost as soon as we got there: sewing curtains, arranging the furniture and knickknacks she got from a company called Home Interiors, and generally making things look lived in, as if we’d been there for years. But at the Green House, as my brother and I called it, she outdid herself. That house was the embodiment of her domestic ambitions. I was even allowed to get a puppy. Unfortunately, it went to the bathroom in front of my dad’s closet and he gave me a “spanking” for that with his belt. (I didn’t cry, though. I never, ever cried, no matter what.) The puppy went back.

Of course, nothing was really different in Charleroi. The same stuff was just happening in a different house. Danny was gambling and drinking to excess. He was an excellent pool player, and, when he was lucky, he would convince some unsuspecting fool to bet against him, saying that he could win with one eye covered. Then Danny would cover up the lazy eye he could barely see out of anyway, and proceed to rake in the other guy’s money.