Inside Out(7)

It didn’t always go his way. He lost huge amounts of money playing poker and would come home raging, drunk, and broke. At one point my father turned to a mafia loan shark to cover his gambling losses, and he was indebted to the mob for years afterward. He had already been working with them to sway local elections for mafia-favored candidates and other low-level, unsavory stuff like that. However indirect my dad’s involvement, it was still dangerous. He got into a shoot-out outside of a bar in Charleroi once. Another time, my mom went with a female friend to a pub in town and was spotted by a mobster who called my dad: he told my dad that mob women weren’t supposed to be out unaccompanied like that; it didn’t look right.

I, meanwhile, started seventh grade, which in Charleroi was part of the giant, terrifying high school. As always, I was the new girl. It’s possible that all the adapting I had to do primed me to become an actress: it was my job to portray whatever character I thought would be most popular in every new school, in every new town. I identified the in crowd and studied them for clues: Did the cool girls wear bell-bottoms or hot pants? What were their accents like? What did I need to do to be accepted? Was it best to try to stand out or blend in? It would be decades before it occurred to me that I could just be whoever I truly am, not the person I guessed other people wanted to see.

Needless to say, whenever I started to get a sense of a place, to decipher how I might fit in through sports or the social scene or what classes I might be good at, it was time to pick up and leave. Usually without much warning, or any kind of logical plan.


I DON’T KNOW which of my dad’s illicit activities provoked this particular fight—whether it was another infidelity, or if he just got too nasty when he was drunk—but one afternoon when I was doing my homework to the background music of my parents fighting at the top of their lungs, I heard my mother scream, “I’ve had it with your shit!” She came storming into my room and told Morgan and me to grab our stuff and get in the car, we were going back to Roswell.

This was nothing out of the ordinary, of course: we were pretty efficient at packing by this point, and we were used to hitting the road for hours on end while my mother chain-smoked out the window. But going back to Roswell was a departure from the exhausting routine of starting over from scratch. Insofar as we understood the concept, Roswell was home. It was where we came from, where we had family and history and an understanding of the culture and the community. And then there was Grandma Marie, whom I’d called “Mother” as a little girl, and who was, in many ways, the only adult I really trusted. Staying with her was grounding, soothing. When we got to her house, it was a relief just to be in her midst.

Even with half a dozen states between them, my parents managed to keep their drama explosive. The screaming phone calls began almost as soon as we arrived—my father’s voice was so loud through the receiver it felt like he was there in the room. My mother would stalk around the house sobbing histrionically, while I tried to stay out of her way. Morgan escaped into his projects: taking apart and putting back together the vacuum cleaner motor, disassembling the alarm clock to see how it worked. When my aunts came around, I realized they were shooting knowing glances at each other during my mother’s outbursts and drinking binges. For the first time I felt embarrassed by her. And I was ashamed of myself for feeling that way.

Ginny wanted me to take her side and tell everyone how horrible my dad had been to her, but I couldn’t. Aside from the gambling, I felt they were equally to blame for the chaos in our lives. Now that I was old enough, I could see how childish she was compared to her sisters—how rarely she took responsibility for herself, and how her default mode was to blame everyone else: my dad, my grandmother, whoever. Little by little, I started to wall myself off from her. With my grandmother around, I didn’t need to overlook my mother’s craziness just to survive.

So, on the inevitable afternoon when Ginny said we were going back to my dad, I didn’t get up and start packing as I always had in the past. Dad had gotten a new job in Washington State, north of Seattle, Ginny told me and my grandmother, and the plan was to return to him in Pennsylvania and then move to the other side of the country together as a family.

I looked at my grandmother. I looked at my mom. And then I said, “I’m not going.” Ginny didn’t give me a good enough reason for returning to the man she’d been spending all of her waking hours maligning to her family or fighting with on the phone. I was sick of things not adding up. Whatever it was they were doing, I didn’t want to be a part of it. My mother tried to persuade me, but she saw that I was immovable. She took Morgan and went back to Charleroi without me.

That summer, I did gymnastics at the Y, where I made my first best friend, Stacy Welch. My grandmother enrolled me in the better public school in Roswell in the fall—we weren’t zoned for it, but Grandma Marie finagled it by dropping me off every morning at Stacy’s house, and then Stacy and I would walk to the bus or Mrs. Welch would drive us to school. I made the cheerleading squad. Suddenly, I was living like a normal person, like everybody else. It felt great.

Once Ginny made it to Washington with my brother, I started getting the push: “You should come up here; it’s beautiful, you’d love it!” And there was a part of me that felt you should be with your parents—a dutiful pull. But why? I was doing fine.

My grandmother took care of me with a consistency I’d never before experienced. She made sure that I finished my homework, brushed my teeth, got to bed on time. She let me paint my room bright yellow because I loved Tweety Bird so much. She was attentive to everything in my life, including the friends I was making at school. If I went to the movies, she would pick me up, or, if she was working, she’d arrange to have someone else get me. Never once was I left standing on a street corner, wondering if anyone would show up. The daily disasters of life with my parents were nonexistent. In essence, I got the version of my grandmother that my mother had always yearned for.