Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(14)
I wrote about my parents’ faces—pale and swollen with sleeplessness—and the knotted feeling inside my stomach. Something terrible was happening: my mother had given up playing backgammon; my father had stopped leaving for work. I described the hushed voices, the closed doors, my gnawing sense that everything would come apart at any moment, that only a barely discernible tensing of all my muscles might hold it together.
My parents sealed themselves in the library for days. “Whatever you do,” my father said as he pulled the door behind him, “do not come in here.”
Whitney and I sat on the porch watching TV, our blank faces masking our alarm, buoyed at least partly by The Brady Bunch, Bewitched, Happy Days. My younger brother’s auburn hair was oddly disheveled, his trousers an inch too short. How I envied my older brothers, both of them off at college, Charlie a sophomore and Bobby a senior.
On day three my parents emerged: drained, older, yet united in their conviction that we should know the truth.
“It’s so awful to have to tell you this,” my mother began in a cracked voice, the puffed wedges underneath her eyes by now a deep purple. “But it’s important you know: your brother Charlie is a drug dealer.” Her eyes filled up with tears and she looked away.
My father dragged on his cigarette dismissively. “We’re taking him out of college. Putting him into the Marines to clean him up.”
As my mother wept my father put his cigarette into the ashtray and gently rested both his hands on her shoulders. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen them touch.
“You must never mention a word about this to anyone outside the family,” my mother said to Whitney and me with unusual sternness, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand. “Nobody at all.”
I felt the news and accompanying emotions seal themselves off inside my body with the ease of a closing elevator door. Drug dealers were something you saw on TV, not in my own family. I remembered an episode of Starsky and Hutch where the drug dealer lived in an abandoned apartment on the outskirts of town. Starsky kicked in the door while Hutch aimed the gun.
I turned on the chandelier so that I could reread my essay. Outside the snow was falling harder now, and a few stray sparrows pecked aimlessly at the frozen ground.
My last winter in Michigan.
Next year I’d be gone—away at boarding school for ninth grade, and away from this house. I’d been waiting to go since sixth grade, counting down the years impatiently.
The applications all asked for an essay on an experience that had changed my life. And so while other eighth graders wrote about their golden retrievers dying, I wrote about Charlie’s drug bust and what it had done to our family, the shame and silence spreading from my parents to us, and then into just about every aspect of our lives.
As I wrote the story, I felt stronger, clearer—separate from those events for the first time. I wrote about the tension in the house, breaking it down into scenes with characters and dialogue, constructing not what actually had happened, but something that felt even realer than that. I wrote everything I’d been forbidden to say, everything that gave me back my voice. I wrote draft after draft, trying to get at the truth.
Charlie had been selling cocaine, a drug I knew about from Time magazine. I’d seen pictures of it, lines of white powder on the cover. My parents had heard the news from Charlie’s college dean earlier that year, in the spring. He was expelled, and, under pressure from my parents, immediately enrolled in Marine boot camp in San Diego, leaving in early June. But as June passed into July, everything kept changing. And the tension in the house got only worse.
Coming home from day camp or tennis lessons, Whitney and I watched TV in the library, or rode skateboards up the street with my cousins Pierre and Freddy. In his universal attempt to avoid my father, Whitney routinely asked Freddy if he could spend the night at his house, but Aunt Nicole sometimes locked the kids outside while the house was being cleaned, or while she napped, and for hours at a time no one would know where Whitney or Freddy had gone. They were nine and ten at the time.
When Whitney finally came home, he’d steer clear of my father even as he sought approval by doing small chores around the house—unloading the dishwasher, say, or feeding the cats. But my father would simply complain about the direction the forks faced in the cutlery drawer, or the ratio of dry cat food to canned food in the cats’ bowls, and Whitney began to wear a permanent expression of defeat.
I usually stayed in my room playing Led Zeppelin and Rolling Stones albums over and over. Sometimes my father would throw open my door and shout, “Turn down that goddamn rock ’n’ roll!” and I’d grab the volume knob so fast the record would skip. Later, I’d turn it all the way up again, partly to block out the eerie silence in our house, but also eager, in a way, for any interaction with my father.
I often found myself thinking about Charlie, who had turned strange over the last couple of years. Once tanned and vital, his face had grown pale and blemished, his eyes flattened like old decals. When he was home, he was, more often than not, on the phone or outside the house talking with people I didn’t recognize, people who came up our driveway in their unfamiliar cars while my father was downtown at work. Charlie referred to the visitors as his “good buddies,” but he never had much else to say about them. He crept around the house, always appearing busy, any closeness I’d felt with him utterly replaced by a disquieting distance.