Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(7)
We walked outside.
“Stand right here,” said my father, his brow unaccountably heavy with anger, pointing to a spot on the sidewalk in front of our house, a six-bedroom Spanish Mediterranean with a sprawling green lawn.
This was a serious game, a game that made my father stern, impatient.
I assumed my position on the pavement, a surge of dread twisting my insides. The facades of neighbors’ houses suddenly became menacing faces; the sound of their gardeners mowing, a barrage of violent sound in my head. No one, it seemed, would be able to save me.
“I’ll go get the car,” said my father, walking across the lawn to the driveway to start the car. Then he drove around the block. Sometime during those two minutes, while I waited alone for the car to reappear from the opposite end of our street, something magical and mortifying happened: my father’s silver Chrysler became someone else’s car, the car of a complete stranger.
My heart jumped at the sight of the approaching sedan, my abductor’s car, as it slowed down upon spotting me, a small blond girl, seven years old, with straight-cut bangs.
“Come here, little girl,” a frightening man with my father’s face called tauntingly from the car. He held a Hershey’s chocolate bar out the window.
I burst into tears and ran away, just as I had been instructed. Kidnappers, I knew, baited young children with candy. But even as I raced up to the front steps of our house, I found no comfort in the familiar. It was the creepy, almost psychotic look on my father’s face as he called out to me, pretending to be someone else, that terrified me.
Charlie sometimes hid me in his room when my father arrived home from work. We’d sit on his bed and look at books about World War II that he’d borrowed from Bobby, books with pictures of Germans in belted overcoats saluting a man with an Oliver Hardy mustache.
“That’s Hitler,” Charlie would tell me. “The one who killed all the Jews.”
I had seen a picture of the Jews once, naked together in a room with no windows. Their hollowed-out eyes stared right through me, and I’d had nightmares for days afterward. “Let’s not look at that book again,” I remember telling him, and he hid the book underneath the bed.
Then he’d get out the Indian beads—thousands of them, sorted by color—and we’d string necklaces. He’d gently teach me how to tie a knot, or combine the beads in a particular pattern, and, if my knot didn’t work, he never became angry when my beads fell all over the scratchy wool bedspread. He’d just pick them up, one by one, and drop them back into the storage box. Sometimes we could hear my father shouting at Bobby, or shouting at my mother down in the kitchen, and we’d go on stringing beads as if nothing were happening.
Eventually my father would throw open the door to Charlie’s room, and he’d send me downstairs so he could fight it out with the boys. Afraid, I’d go into the living room where my mother was busy reading a book, and we’d silently listen to my father chasing Bobby and Charlie up and down the long hallway upstairs as if trying to corral a particularly willful herd of cattle. Loud thumps echoed through the floorboards after my father managed to catch my brothers, but my mother never so much as looked up from her novel.
It was as if I were experiencing the blows myself, compounded by a terrible sense of helplessness. To distract myself, I’d get out my markers and a sketchpad and draw movie stars or Bible scenes I’d studied in Sunday school. I’d spend hours getting the face of Humphrey Bogart or Jesus Christ just right, starting over again and again until the eyes, nose, and mouth were perfect. At school I was universally known to be the best artist, and at home I was mostly left alone to do my drawings, an invisible bubble forming around me, blocking out everything happening inside the house.
Having formed a close friendship in early childhood, Bobby and Charlie spent most of their time together, with Bobby as the leader. When Bobby built a model of the Ti tanic, Charlie would also build a model of the Titanic—only not as well.
One summer evening when they were eight and ten years old, Bobby and Charlie jumped on their bikes and rode up to Rose Terrace, the Dodge family’s lakefront estate, to wait in line for a public viewing of Mrs. Horace Dodge’s open casket. Once inside, they filed past her body and, to the shock and dismay of the other spectators, Charlie reached out and pinched the corpse’s overly rouged cheek while Bobby giggled approvingly.
Charlie struggled with his schoolwork, often having to retake tests, catch up on reading, and endlessly practice word pronunciation with my mother, and yet he was a favorite among his teachers. In hushed voices my parents sometimes referred to him as “slow,” but he never received any educational testing or special attention at school. My parents’ expectations were simply lower for him than for Bobby, and they deemed Charlie’s approval-seeking behaviors as natural for a child with his lesser intelligence.
My father’s nicknames of “Chas” for Charlie and “Nit-Wit” for Whitney made his allegiances clear; among his sons, Bobby was the crowned prince. He laughed at Bobby’s jokes, encouraged his rare-beer-can collecting, and praised his term papers. Charlie could only trail in Bobby’s shadow, awkwardly adopting his hobbies and witticisms. The gentler of the two older boys, and the lesser student, Charlie suffered the brunt of my father’s unpredictable moods, absorbing his scathing criticism and bullying until he escaped to the relative safety of boarding school.