He slept upstairs and Nanny had her own rooms downstairs. I’d fall asleep beside him listening to the songs of the crickets after watching him snore softly beside me for a time. I loved his funny old face and wisps of gray hair pulled out as if they were trying to look sleek and long. On walks along Brush Creek he told me stories about growing up on a farm in Iowa. I was his “little daisy,” and I loved watching his eyes go soft when he called me that. He was my first big taste of real love, always assuring me with his gentle warmth, “Little daisy of mine, you can never make me mad enough to not love you.” Oh, there were times I tried to prove him wrong, but nothing I did ever shook him.
Not long after Johnny and I moved in with Nank and Nanny, Nanny went into the hospital and never came home again. Gin bottles were found hidden all over the house, which explained Nanny’s “funny moods.” Mom escaped from Menninger’s a few days after the funeral and hitchhiked the 250 miles home to Prairie Village. Nank didn’t have the heart to send her back, and he moved her into the room Nanny had recently vacated.
All of us somehow managed our various assignments for survival. There we were, the four of us, a splintered family living in separate rooms in a big house no one could really call home. Nank stayed in his wing, Mom, Johnny, and I used the other three rooms, and no one saw each other much. Mom slept a lot, and when she was awake she roamed the house in her nightgown, mumbling words no one could understand. Twice that year, Johnny found Mom bleeding in bed after attempts to slash her wrists.
For years I had worshipped my mother. For Johnny she was a skirt to hide behind when Dad raged at her, at me, at the world. For me, she was comfort when Dad lost his temper over a simple thing like reaching into the cookie jar after dinner. “Fatso!” he would yell, whacking me across the head with the back of his hand and sending me to my room to sob my heart out. Mom would come in after a while with a plate of those cookies and a glass of cold milk. Dad took his temper out on Johnny now and then, but I was older, and sassier, and a girl, and he had a thing for girls. Once, reeking of Scotch, he took a hairbrush to my legs and buttocks, slapping me over and over until my tender skin was bloody. I wailed inside each time the bristles hit, but I never made a sound. My mother stayed out of it, never shouted at him to stop and leave me alone, and I didn’t really care. I assumed I must have been bad to deserve this, and no one needed to see it.
Before she got sick, Mom kept house, threw parties, and volunteered as a Cub Scout mom and Girl Scout mom. She met Dad at the country club on weekends and visited with girlfriends while I swam or practiced with the water ballet team. We went to church with Nank and Nanny, and now and then with Dad, too, and I sang in the choir, tears running down my cheeks sometimes from the beauty of the songs as the organ music lifted up my spirit to meet God.
Since she’d been in the hospital, I didn’t know how to talk to Mom. Johnny was the good boy, keeping an eye on her when he came home from school, while I did everything I could to stay away. Nash and Gerri were the world to me. We threw water balloons at passing cars, drove too fast in the family car I “stole” when Nank was sleeping, spray-painted the word “F U C K” on the elegant statuary around town, and prized our star piece of contraband, a sign that read “DO NOT STEAL THIS SIGN.” My diet consisted of jumbo packs of Hydrox cookies dipped in milk, Campbell’s Tomato Soup, and Hormel chili supplemented by trips to Winstead’s Drive-In for double cheeseburgers in Gerri’s ’57 Chevy. I had a charge account with the local cab company and the local drug store and soda fountain, and everything was “neat” and “swell.” My older friends had driver’s licenses, and the 3.2 beer sold in Kansas flowed freely at the basement den parties where “Kernie and the gang” hung out. Nash and I were wannabe beatniks, and we read Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin while soul-searching our way through ninth and tenth grades. Nash asked questions about morality, politics, and philosophy, opening my mind to questioning authority and to expanded ways of thinking. She planned to quit high school early and travel the world. I wanted to do it, too.
But my family had other ideas for me. The summer before my junior year my dad remarried and decided his kids needed more supervision. He would send me to a boarding school he’d heard about in Fort Lauderdale, and Johnny would go to a military academy.
I was outraged. Leave my friends? Johnny? The love between us surpasses all understanding; we were everything to one another.
Boarding school. I felt ostracized, barred from my past. Miss Harrington, the dorm mother, a stern spinster who lived in an apartment at the entrance to the one-story house where twenty other girls shared rooms, was now my authority figure. I instantly hated her. It was the job of teenage girls to give the dorm mother a hard time, and I was good at my job. But I was determined to make this boarding school thing work.
A friendly person by nature, I jumped in to my new life with abandon. I listened to the chatty girls, gathering data. Just where would I fit in? My roommate, Adrianne, was okay, blonde and tall and about as lost as I was, having just arrived from Michigan. Adrianne and I staked out our personal territory, hung our old school banners over our beds, and began the process of adjusting to an environment that was hardly terrible, given that the Fort Lauderdale beaches were our backyard on the weekends. We wore Bermuda shorts to classes, walking in our saddle shoes the short distance to the local soda shop, school dining room, and classrooms. The air was humid and heavy, and it made my curly hair frizz, but Adrienne helped me style it into something cute. I tried to make friends with the day students who lived off campus with their parents, hoping I would be invited for overnights on the weekends, but it didn’t happen often.
Before the first semester ended, I began to notice some good things about being new. I had a clean slate here at Pine Crest Prep. No one had parents who didn’t think I was a good influence on their daughter (no supervision at home, you know!). No one knew my mother’s story. I had friends, I dated boys, and I joined the cheerleading team. For my sixteenth birthday, Nank gave me a Chevy Impala convertible, which kicked off as much fun as I knew how to have and still make it to graduation. I flirted relentlessly with the tall basketball players and had a crush on most of the cute guys on the football team, but for the most part, I found boys disappointing. I loved making out with them and vying for their attention, but I was terrified of their penises and had no interest in sex. I vowed to remain a virgin until I married.
By Christmas, Dad was getting another divorce and moving to Fort Lauderdale to live with his new girlfriend, Marty—his ex-wife’s friend—two miles from me. Her two daughters were day students at my school, which is how Dad had heard of Pine Crest Prep in the first place. I thought it was strange he didn’t ask me to come and live with them, but he didn’t, and I decided it was best this way. I had more freedom. Before I knew it, Dad and Marty were off to Las Vegas to get married, and suddenly I had inherited two stepsisters. (“I’m a cocksman,” Dad had once boasted. “The women love me.” “What’s a cocksman?” I had asked.) News came from home that Nank had remarried, too, a blue-haired woman named Elizabeth who I was sure was after his money, and he moved Mom into an apartment near his house. Gerri and Nash visited from Kansas that Christmas, bringing me a taste of home, until Gerri surprised me speechless by falling in love with my roommate and running away with her not too long after that. I had never even heard of a lesbian, and here my best friend turned out to be one! Was everybody nuts or what?
Senior year was a new story. Johnny hated military school and Dad let him join me at Pine Crest. I had been voted captain of the Panther-ettes, my cheerleading team, and my popularity would help Johnny be accepted. We would tolerate the occasional weekend visits to Dad’s new life and be pleasant enough to his stepdaughters when we ran into them at school.
Football fans came to our school games, and two of them were Jill and Frank, a couple of the friendliest people I had ever met. Jill and Frank never missed a game, and they were interested in me—a girl whose father lived nearby and kept her at boarding school. They invited me home for Italian dinners, laughed at the way I pronounced “Parm-ee-ze-an,” and begged me to come live with them. They would have taken Johnny, too, a fact we both loved, but Dad would never have allowed that. He showed his true colors when he asked, “Who are these guineas you two are friends with?” (I later learned that “guinea” was derogatory slang for Italians, and I seethed inside that I had a dad who was so lame.)
Sometime around my birthday,