Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(22)

I passed Henry Ford II’s neo-Georgian estate where the Hugo Higbies had lived before him. Then I drove out of the gated entrance to our cul-de-sac, the armed guard waving me through from his mini brick fortress, and down one block to Lakeshore Drive.

I turned left, having no idea where I was headed. All I wanted was to drive along the expanse of the blue lake, listen to Fleetwood Mac, and smoke.

Peppering Lakeshore Drive—once the jewel of Grosse Pointe, with its sprawling lakefront estates built as summer houses in the first quarter of the century with automotive money—were scores of Mafia palaces. Most of the grand, old houses had been leveled, the properties subdivided. Few could afford the staff to run them. New houses had gone up on smaller lots. I studied their red-tile roofs, stucco walls, and flags of Italy flapping at full mast in the brisk wind off the lake. Mafia and automotive money now shared property lines, and everyone had bumper stickers pleading “Buy American.”

The sun dipped low, setting the lake on fire, while above it a sky of blue glass began to crack with stars. I knew I should be home studying for my algebra test the next morning. But I’d had to get away from the sound of my father’s voice.

I turned the car around by the yacht club and started heading back. The lights of Windsor were just coming on across the lake: Canada—our unlikely neighbor. My father had once taken me to Niagara Falls. We’d spent the afternoons in the wax museums looking at life-size wax replicas of famous actors, then on barstools in the saloons where I’d sipped Shirley Temples and feasted on salty peanuts while my father had cocktails.

Now my father’s favorite bar was Gallagher’s. Ever since Stroh’s had expanded nationally by acquiring Schlitz and Schaefer, he’d begun to feel peripheral at work. I sometimes wondered if he’d been replaced without actually being fired. I knew he’d had no involvement in the new popular “Alex the dog” ad campaign, starring a golden retriever who fetched a can of Stroh’s Beer from the fridge for his owner, then drank it himself.

Then, when my father’s brother Gari was suddenly paralyzed by a riding accident, leaving him in a wheelchair with only slight movement of his neck, like Christopher Reeve, my father had declined even further. The two brothers had never seemed close, getting together only once or twice a year, but the accident had come as a huge blow to the entire family. Now I understood that my father felt things, deeper down, that he didn’t let on about.

Each day at noon my father left his office to have lunch at Gallagher’s and then camped out at the bar for the balance of the day. He came home in the evening as if he’d just left from work, wintergreen mints floating on his breath barely masking the scent of the booze.

Whitney and I usually stayed upstairs in our rooms during this witching hour and focused on our homework. Or at least pretended to. My father always entered through the side door, his footsteps falling heavily on the linoleum in the back hall, making my spine stiffen as I sat at my desk. Once he’d come into my room while I was writing a paper and had slapped me across the face, for no apparent reason. Later, he’d come back in, crying and apologizing. He was just drunk, he said.

The last of the evening light across the lake dissolved into black. There was nowhere else to go except home, though I wished I could just drive until I found the sun again, over the horizon beyond everything known or visible. I’d drive through wheat fields and cities and suburbs where other kids dreamed of leaving, and from there I’d keep going, never stopping until I came to that spot of sun I could sometimes see from this distance, or at least imagine was there.


The dinner dishes had already been stacked in the sink when I came into the kitchen. My uneaten portion remained in a pot on the stove—Chef Boyardee canned ravioli. Jell-O brand chocolate pudding cooled in glass cups on the countertop. A salad of iceberg lettuce wilting in a wooden bowl. It was the kind of food we ate when my mother hadn’t found time to grocery shop.

I took a fork from the drawer and speared the ravioli into my mouth straight from the pot. The pasta shell was still warm but the meat filling was stiff with cold. Sometimes my mother didn’t heat things all the way through.

I heard the clatter of my mother’s loafer heels on the dining room’s wooden floor.

“Where have you been, Frances?” she said as she came into the kitchen.

“Studying with Andrea,” I said automatically, still chewing over the stove. Andrea was my chemistry study partner, and I happened to be getting an A in chemistry.

“Andrea’s a nice girl,” my mother conceded. She went over to the sink and began rinsing the dishes, then loading them into the dishwasher. She wore a wool tweed skirt and a T-shirt with the word Bermuda across the front in pink script. The freckles on her calves danced chaotically as she sponged off the dishes. I watched the brownish spots with detached interest, hoping I could sleep in the aftermath of the acid. I planned to wake up at 4:30 a.m. to study for my math test.

I opened the refrigerator and stood staring at its contents. A half-eaten honey-baked ham draped with foil, a macaroni-and-cheese casserole from the week before, three eggs.

My mother had either been at the real estate office (her new job), touring houses with clients, or playing backgammon. Both occupations had become her antidote to the bedlam at home while also helping to create it. And since she was the first woman in her family to work and to not have a cook, we were often left to forage.