Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and You Too!(24)

I wanted to escape, to go away to boarding school, anything to get away from my father and all the friends I had lost. My parents couldn’t afford boarding school; otherwise they would have been glad to send me. They were just as tired of me as I was of them. I would make my way through one group of friends and then move on to another, and when I was out of people, my parents would transfer me to a different school. I went from being a sweet and feisty and happy and spoiled little girl who just had to smile to get anything I wanted to being a girl who had the rug ripped out from under her, and everything she considered to be love taken away. I didn’t understand what was happening, but I was so angry. I was losing my grip and flailing around, and I couldn’t calm down long enough for anyone to help me, because I really didn’t believe anyone could. No one seemed reliable.

    “I remember once sitting around for some family dinner. I must have been around thirteen. There weren’t many of us there, just my parents and Shana, and I looked around the table thinking, These are not my people. I thought, I’m going to have to branch out on my own at some point. Obviously, I’ll keep in touch with these people who have had a hand in keeping me alive and feeding me, but this can’t be my real family.”

“And what did that feel like?”

“I think I wanted to reject them before they could reject me,” I told Dan.

Dan asked me if my parents had any grief counseling or if they took any of us to therapy. This was laughable. They didn’t know anything about therapy or what responsible people did when their children died. They thought a parent-teacher conference was a social mixer for adults—simply because it was at night—therefore, it made no difference whether they showed up or not.

“The subject of therapy never came up except for the time I woke up and pretended I couldn’t move my legs.”

“What was wrong with your legs?”

“I believe I was trying to avoid a German test that I had neglected to study for, but now that we’re talking about this, I could have just feigned being sick, if that was the case, because my parents generally didn’t challenge that. I remember saying something to my mom about having polio and her rolling her eyes at me, which made me work even harder at convincing her I had polio. I must have been thirteen or fourteen at the time.”

    At the emergency room that day, the doctor pricked my legs up and down with a needle while I pretended not to feel a thing—and when he was done, he drew the curtain to my examination room shut and suggested to my parents that I have a psychiatric evaluation. They brought me to three different therapists, but I refused to speak to any of them. I just sat there and grimaced and stared each one down until they gave up. Every therapist who gave up was another win. I was as stubborn as I needed to be, and when anyone around me gave up on me, I had won again. They had failed the test. Another faker who pretended they cared but didn’t really.

Saying all of these incredibly embarrassing things out loud to someone made me feel sick, mostly. I thought about the absurdity of being forty-two years old and opting to get a psychiatric evaluation from a doctor, after telling him a story about getting a psychiatric evaluation from another doctor. What…a full circle.

“My father may as well have been dead at that point,” I told Dan. “He was never the same after Chet died—none of us were—but he never really came back until years later, and then there was a good ten years of happier times.”

“Tell me about that.”

“I mean, I love him now, but it took a long time for us to reconnect. It wasn’t until I moved to Los Angeles and came home to visit them. I would come home for a week during Christmas and a week in the summer, and my dad would pick me up at Newark Airport. I remember loving that. I would be so excited on the flight, and then running out to see him. He always had a great big reaction to seeing me—arms waving in the air, happy, smiling big.”

    As I recounted this to Dan, I remembered never having to wait for my father at the airport, other than for him to circle the area in order to avoid getting a ticket from the police. He always picked me up when I came home, and I never had to wait for him. I had forgotten that.

Dan was looking at me with the recognition of what I’d just discovered.

“He finally started showing up for me.” I knew to sit with that before Dan had to tell me.

I had to leave my parents to love them again. I had to move across the country to appreciate that I actually had any pull toward them—that I needed them. I had to get away from them in order to come back to them. I’d like to say that they did the best that they could, but that couldn’t have been their best. I wasn’t doing my best either, so the idea that everyone is always doing the best they can is a trope. Some people are just interested in surviving; doing their best doesn’t even occur to them.

I felt loved by my dad again, celebrated. He was impressed that I had moved to Los Angeles at nineteen, on my own, and was doing stand-up comedy, and he wanted to hear everything and anything about my life.

When I think back about that time, I am struck by my fearlessness, my drive, my ambition. It doesn’t even feel like me now. I’m jealous of that girl. A girl with a plan. I knew exactly what I was going to be, and I was right—powerful. My intention broadsided any challenge that came my way. I didn’t care what anyone thought, what anyone said, all I wanted was my own life, and I was going to keep moving until I got it. I wanted to be a person people could depend on, and I was going to do it my way. You would have to be young and stupid to believe that you are going to move to Los Angeles to become famous, which is exactly what it takes to achieve a fantasy—youth and stupidity.