Unwifeable(23)

The older we got, the weirder it got. At eleven and eight, respectively, my sister and I were too old to be running around naked in the house, and my parents definitely shouldn’t have been naked themselves, but there they were. Doors were always open, and we could see as my dad changed in front of us. My mom, meanwhile, would be in her threadbare white underpants, trying to figure out what clothes she could stand to wear. I look back at pictures of this time, and I see my sister and me posing with our towels open by the pool making kissy faces. It looks like we’re getting groomed to be sold into sexual slavery.

Of course, we were just the children of na?ve hippies. Nothing more.

“But it sounds like it was a hypersexualized household,” the therapist says.

“I just don’t want to criticize my parents,” I say. “I love my parents—so much.”

Then I am quiet. Then I am crass. Crasser than my father even. Crasser than even ol’ iron-in-the-skull Phineas Gage.

“All the same,” I practically spit, “I wish I didn’t have such a clear picture of my dad’s dick in my mind. He was blind. We were not.”

The therapist looks a little taken aback, but she asks me to continue.

“Was your father ever sexual with you?”

“Oh my God, no!” I say.

But, I confess, there was always that sexualized electricity in the house—where that energy just seemed to be swirling around him. Maybe it was the women he flirted with, who always seemed to be so enraptured by the alpha-war-hero energy he put out. I remember one woman who would call our house frequently, and when I answered in my clearly teenage voice, she would speak breathlessly, as if she was in the middle of masturbating, and simply say, “Jerrrrrrry.”

I hated her so much. “YOU WANT TO TALK TO MY DAD?” I’d say, my voice pinched with anger. “IS THAT WHAT YOU’RE SAYING?”

Cheating happened early in my parents’ marriage. My dad would always employ various “readers” to help with his paperwork, and, as my mom candidly told me, one time a reader was doing a lot more than reading. My mom heard the sound of my dad’s belt unbuckle. My mother went in, mortified. My father said, “We weren’t going to have sex.”

This all happened in what was to be my room—before I was born.

“So you have resentment against your father,” the therapist says.

“No,” I say. “Yes. I don’t know. Sometimes. The resentment is muted out by overwhelming love. Does that make any sense?”

As I grew older, I could feel the way my dad’s friends looked at me without my father’s knowledge. At the LA premiere for a documentary my dad was featured in called Vietnam, Long Time Coming, one of the high-ranking officers talking to my father began stroking his finger slowly along my shoulder blade as my dad stood there, continuing to tell his stories, grinning and rhapsodizing, with no idea what was happening.

Even earlier at that same movie screening, a woman got up to speak after the movie, and since it was a pretty heavy film about disabled veterans, she figured she would tell a lighthearted anecdote to cut the tension. In front of this packed auditorium, which included me and my eighty-something-year-old great-aunt, she smiled and proceeded.

“To lighten the mood,” the attractive woman said, laughing, “I’ll tell you what Jerry Stadtmiller told me right before the plane took off from LA to Vietnam. He turned to me and said, ‘Don’t feel too sorry for me. I’ve got a fourteen-inch cock.’?”

I slunk down into my seat, so embarrassed.

When my father, who became a licensed massage therapist during one of his many careers, told me as a teenager that he could no longer give me massages because his shrink had told him it was “inappropriate,” I felt ashamed. I know it wasn’t his intention—my dad was simply doing the responsible thing. But everything was always so confusing. I was bad? I was inappropriate? I was sexually desirable? Why was he giving me massages in the first place? Why was he telling me any of this?

Let me be crystal clear right now, as I was with my therapist: My father never did anything unseemly with me—ever. Both my parents are wonderful human beings. But there were things lacking in my childhood—namely, boundaries. They were raised with none themselves. It makes sense, in a way.

“Do you still talk to your parents?” the therapist asks me.

Every once in a while, I tell her, but our calls usually go something like this . . .

Me to my mom: “A doctor told me I was anorexic.”

Mom: “Well, Jane Fonda was anorexic her whole life, and she was a successful actress.”

Me to my dad: “I think I may have a drinking problem.”

Dad: “I find having a drink at the end of the day really takes the edge off.”

They don’t read any of my stories in the Post, and when I try to talk to them about it—about what it’s like to have to write a cover story in under an hour that the entire city will be reading the next day and how much pressure that is, my dad responds by bringing up a really great email he wrote someone recently.

I feel so dismissed when they act like this. I don’t feel cared for or nurtured or seen.

Moods and loyalties changed often with my parents growing up, and they still do. Like unwitting practitioners of the 48 Laws of Power, my parents embodied Rule 17 to a T: “Keep others in suspended terror: Cultivate an air of unpredictability.”