I'll Be Gone in the Dark(11)

My siblings arrived in quick succession, four girls and a boy; I was the youngest, born after a six-year gap. My sister closest to me in age, Mary Rita, was too much older than me to be a real playmate. Looking back now, it feels as though I was born into a party that had started to wind down. By the time I came around, my parents had matching La-Z-Boy armchairs. Our front door was partly glass, and standing there you could see the back of my mother’s beige armchair in the living room. When any of the





kids’ friends rang the doorbell, she’d stick her hand up and make a circling motion. “Go around,” she’d shout, directing them to the unlocked back door.

The families on our block were close, but the kids were all the same ages as my older siblings. They ran in a pack and returned home at dusk. I have a keen memory of what it was like to be a teenager in the seventies because I spent a lot of time with them. My sister Kathleen, ten years older, was and is the most extroverted of our family, and she toted me around like a beloved toy. I remember teetering precariously on the back of her banana seat as she pedaled to the Jewel grocery store on Madison Street. Everyone seemed to know her. “Hey, Beanie!” they called, using her nickname.

In Beanie’s freshmen year of high school, she developed an all-consuming crush on Anton, a quiet blond-haired boy who ran track. She took me with her to one of his meets. We hid high up in the bleachers to peek at him. I remember the love-wrecked expression on her face as we watched him explode forth from the starting line. I didn’t realize it then, but I was losing her to the complexities of high school. Soon I was sitting alone on the top of the back stairs that connected our kitchen to the second floor, watching teenage boys in sideburns chug beers in our breakfast nook as the Steve Miller Band’s “The Joker” played too loud.

Everyone in my family speaks mock reverently about the day in 1974 when the Van sisters—Lisa, my age; Kris, a year older— moved in across the street.

“Thank God,” they tease. “What would we have done with you?”

MANY OF MY PARENTS’ CLOSEST FRIENDS WERE FROM GRAMMAR school and high school. That they’d maintained such close bonds in an increasingly unmoored and transient world was a point of pride for them, as it should be, but it also had the effect, I think,





of insulating them. Take them out of their comfort zone, and they became a little ill at ease. I think an undercurrent of shyness ran through them both. They gravitated toward bigger personalities. They used humor, sometimes sharply, to deflect tension. My mother especially seemed always in a state of suppressing— emotions, expectations. She had small, freckled hands and a habit of tugging her fingers when things got unpleasant.

I don’t mean to give the wrong impression. They were bright, curious people who traveled the world once they could afford to. My father argued, and lost, a case in front of the Supreme Court in 1971 that’s still studied in constitutional law classes. They subscribed to the New Yorker. They always had an interest in popular culture and what was considered good, or cool. My mother allowed herself to be taken to see Boogie Nights. (“I’m going to watch The Sound of Music twenty times in a row to forget that,” she said.) They were Kennedy Democrats. “Politically progressive,” my mother liked to say, “but socially conservative.” My father took my older sisters when they were ten and eight downtown to see Martin Luther King speak. They voted for Mondale in ’84. But when I was nineteen, my mother once woke me at dawn in a panic, shaking a handful of unfamiliar (to her) pills. She couldn’t bring herself to say “pill.”

“You’re on the . . . ,” she said.

“Fiber,” I said, and turned back to sleep.

BUT THEN OUR RELATIONSHIP WAS ALWAYS FRAUGHT. MY SISTER Maureen remembers coming home when I was around two and finding my mother pacing the front porch. “I don’t know if I’m crazy,” she said, fighting tears, “or Michelle.” My mother was forty then. She had endured alcoholic parents and the death of an infant son. She was raising six kids with no help. I’m sure I was the crazy one. Her lifelong nickname for me, only half-jokingly, was the Little Witch.





We button-pushed our whole lives. She stonewalled. I glowered. She scribbled notes on envelopes and slid them under my bedroom door. “You’re vain, thoughtless, and rude,” a notorious one went, concluding, “but you’re my daughter and of course I love you very much.” We had a summer cabin on Lake Michigan, and I remember one afternoon as a kid playing in the waves as she read a book in a chair on the beach. I realized that the waves were just high enough so that I could remain underwater and then rise for a quick breath when the wave was at its highest, shielding me from view. I let my mother straighten up and scan the water. I let her put down her book. I let her stand. I let her run toward the water preparing to scream. Only then did I pop up nonchalantly.


I wish now that I’d been kinder to her. I used to rib her about the fact that she couldn’t bear to watch certain scenes in movies or on TV shows. She couldn’t take scenes in which someone threw a party and no one came. She avoided movies about salesmen down on their luck. The specificity was what I found peculiar and amusing; I now see it as the mark of a deeply sensitive person. Her father was once a successful salesman whose career bottomed out. She witnessed her parents’ problems with alcohol and the insistent mime of merrymaking that went on too long. I see her vulnerabilities now. Her parents valued social success and dismissed signs of my mother’s quick, eager mind. She felt thwarted. She could be undermining and cutting in her remarks, but the older me sees that as a reflection of her own undercut self-image.