Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(26)

It was Christmas, my father’s favorite day of the year, and everything was going to seed. He seemed distracted, smiling vaguely in the direction of laughter, changing lenses on his Leica more often than necessary. I wished I could comfort him. He appeared entirely unmoored.

“Let’s get one more shot,” he kept saying to the four of us. “Who knows when you’ll all be home together again.”

We lined up in front of the fireplace a third time. The heat burned into my back through my silk blouse. Charlie had recently been honorably discharged from the Marines and was sporting civilian clothes. Bobby and Whitney wore blue blazers and ties.

My father snapped the shutter. He lifted his cigarette from the ashtray and looked around the room for another background. The house felt empty without his guitars, his cameras, his mountains of pipes, books, and CDs.

The snow fell hard, thickly blanketing the roads within minutes of the snowplow’s last round of exertions. People kept arriving at the house—Aunt Mard plunging her walker into the snow, Grandmother Susie in her mink coat and chinchilla hair—and dinner was postponed in favor of more cocktails. My father took coats and mixed drinks while my mother checked the turkey in the roaster. Bobby and Charlie appeared momentarily in the kitchen and beckoned me out and up the back stairs.

Bobby opened the door to his room. Three finely cut lines of cocaine sat in a row on the glass top of his desk.

“Here, Franny,” Bobby said, handing me a rolled-up bill. “You go first.”

A bird’s wings fluttered inside my chest. My brothers had never offered me drugs. Bobby’s mystifying room, where as a child I had spied on him kissing his girlfriend on the bed, where I had learned about sex from the porn magazines stored in the top drawer of his desk, had now become the place where the gap between me and my much older brothers—of age, gender, untold worlds of experience—would forever close.

Charlie sat on the bed smiling at me. His Marine crew cut hadn’t yet grown out, underscoring the impossibly sharp angles of his face. He still lived in Southern California, where he was looking for a job. “Go ahead, Franny,” he said encouragingly. “You’ll like it. I promise.”

Once upon a time Charlie’s childhood room had been my refuge. “Sit down, Princess,” he would say, patting the bed. And after we’d strung our bead necklaces, he’d tie mine behind my neck with kind, gentle fingers, as if not to break me.

I took the bill from Bobby and inhaled a line in one swift motion. “Wow,” I said, feeling the searing heat spread through my sinuses. “That’s intense.”

“Don’t worry,” said Bobby. “That’s the worst part. Just hold on.”

I let them believe this was my first time.

Bobby did his line and Charlie followed. Bobby smeared his finger on the glass and rubbed the residue on his upper gums. He had a trim brown mustache and steely blue eyes that revealed no emotion whatsoever. We could hear our mother calling us from downstairs, but we lingered, pretending we hadn’t heard her.

I sat down on the bed. The room was so cold I could see my breath.

Bobby leaned back in the swiveling desk chair. “Dad seems really out of it,” he said. “You see how he’d light a cigarette, put it down in the ashtray, then light up another?”

“I saw him drink, like, four Cokes in an hour,” said Charlie.

“Jesus Christ!” said Bobby. He licked his gums. “That man has a death wish.” He unrolled the bill and slid it back into his wallet.

I felt a pang of protectiveness toward my father. All day he’d been going through the motions, trying to keep up appearances. “We can’t imagine the hell he’s been through in the last few months,” I said. “Anyway, at least it wasn’t four vodkas.”

“He’s just so screwed up,” said Charlie, shaking his head, his face darkening with anger. “He pulled me aside earlier and told me the divorce was my fault. You believe it? Bunch of bullshit—everyone knows it was his drinking.”

“Who the hell knows what it was . . .” Bobby trailed off, looking over at me.

I nodded silently. We all secretly believed that Charlie’s coke bust had been the catalyst that led to my parents’ marriage coming unraveled, if not exactly the cause. My parents had never known how to really talk to each other or comfort each other, and what little foundation they’d had sim ply crumbled apart. Scripted conversations weren’t enough to sustain any real sense of connection. And so my father began drinking more, while my mother took refuge in real estate and backgammon tournaments, but the fact was they’d been headed their separate ways years before Charlie’s bust ever slammed it all home.

That fall, after my mother filed for divorce, my father went into rehab, in hopes of getting my mother back, and a monumental weight had lifted from all of us when he became sober.

“Mom and Dad haven’t gotten along in years,” I added. “That’s no one’s fault.”

Bobby looked over at Charlie. “Dad quitting his job didn’t help.”

“Whatever. He’s the same old prick he’s always been,” said Charlie. “Mom did the right thing, getting out.”

Everyone was gathered at the table when we came down, the coiffed, downy heads of great-aunts and grandmothers bobbing with the conversation. Plates had been piled with turkey, mashed potatoes, and French green beans.