Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(25)
I poured a Coke over ice and went into the library, where Whitney sat watching the music video of “Burning Down the House.” David Byrne’s absurdly blank expression bobbed around on the screen as flames consumed a suburban dwelling.
In the weeks that followed the car wreck, my parents hardly mentioned it. I had been expecting consequences, like being grounded from driving, but there weren’t any. The huge splotches of blood they saw on my fisherman’s sweater when they met me at the hospital—the steering wheel had saved my life, but done a number on me in the process—had subdued them. Thankfully, my friends had all walked away unharmed.
Then February brought the distraction of good news: I’d been accepted to Duke on early decision. My spotty career as a boarding-school-castoff-turned-public-school-lawn-urchin had finally ended; I’d made the grade. My parents were thrilled.
After that, I’d spent the last months of high school skipping classes more often than usual, drinking beer on the lawn of the War Memorial or getting stoned in the parking lot of Angel Park. I figured I’d earned it, and Mr. LeMieux, the assistant principal, still gave me a big hug at graduation when he handed me my diploma. South High was the first school where the administration and faculty had actually liked me. No matter how many of their rules I’d broken.
My mother’s car pulled into the driveway just then and through the fishfly-covered screen door, we could hear her calling us outside. “Frances, Whitney, let’s go for a drive!”
I turned off the TV, David Byrne’s autistic face vanishing to some nihilism further yet.
We drove to the end of our cul-de-sac, and she parked next to the golf course. We never came down here; something was clearly wrong.
My mother didn’t get out of the car. She wore a sleeveless blouse, Bermuda shorts, and her signature beat-up penny loafers. Her red hair had lost its luster, her once thickly lashed green eyes looked dull and lifeless, and her years of playing backgammon in the sun on the club’s upper deck had left her badly freckled.
“Dad and I are getting divorced,” she blurted out, still gripping the steering wheel.
I knew right away this must have been her idea. My father had been acting out for years—coming home drunk, yelling at all of us. In several fits of frustration I’d even told my mother to do this, divorce him; now that it was really happening, I felt a confusing mixture of shame and elation at the power I seemed to have over their lives.
I glanced down at her cottage-cheese thighs. She was fifty-one. How would she ever find someone else? I turned to look at Whitney in the backseat. His eyes were opened wide with shock as he scanned my face for a reaction. Neither of us spoke.
“But Dad doesn’t know this yet,” she continued. “My attorney is out of town for three weeks, and I can’t tell Dad until he’s back.” She looked at us both sternly. “I just needed you to know so that you could adjust before school starts. So. Will you promise me, both of you, that you won’t say anything to Dad?”
Whitney and I both looked down and muttered our agreement.
Satisfied, my mother turned the car around and took us back to the house, driving too quickly up the driveway, along the fringes of which my father had erected dozens of three-feet-tall metal reflector rods poking out of the grass. Ostensibly, the reflectors protected the lawn from tire marks. But this obstacle course only served to send my father into a rage each time someone knocked over a reflector on the trip up or down the driveway. Usually he would run out of the house to yell at the potential offender before it even happened.
The next three weeks I spent packing for college and observing my oblivious father with nagging waves of guilt and sadness. I knew he would be crushed when he finally got the news, but by then I’d be gone.
“Are you excited?” he asked me one day, standing in the doorway to my room as I sorted my cassettes. “Or are you going to miss us?”
I felt a sharp sting in my sinuses and suppressed the urge to cry. I slotted some U2 bootlegs into my cassette traveler. “Both, Dad,” I said, my voice uneven, but we were talking about different things. The world he imagined I’d miss was already gone—he just didn’t know it yet.
FENCE IN DETROIT, 1984
(by Frances Stroh)
When I arrived home for Christmas after my first semester at Duke, where I’d been learning to balance the enormous workload with nightly—and often all-night—parties, my father was living temporarily in a two-bedroom house on Mapleton Road, known as the “maids’ road.” My mother, who’d recently become a small-time Grosse Pointe real estate baron, had rented the house to him while she kept the big house on Provencal Road.
Christmas Day my father came over in a jacket and tie, as my mother’s guest. Out of habit, he built the fire in the living room, welcomed the relatives at the door, took photographs of our group standing before the fireplace, the flames blazing behind us, but the tension of his dominance was gone, leaving in its wake an unsettling disorder.
By the fireplace, I watched Whitney set a glass down on an antique table without using a coaster. My father said nothing. Late the night before, after a party, I had come home long past curfew without any concern about my father’s reaction. Bobby and Charlie talked loudly in the kitchen, drinking beer, after I’d gone to bed. And now our relatives’ cars were parked haphazardly outside in the driveway—not in the neat lines my father had always enforced.