Chapter 10
1982 – AFTER THE NIGHT OF THE QUAALUDE
Rich family. Pig rich. Six nannies, two cooks, and a cleaning staff rich. Multiple estates. We were our own economy. My dad wouldn’t experiment with losing a chunk of it for another twenty-plus years.
My father had two brothers, and my mother had a sister she barely spoke to. She’d never said why. She never said much that was worth listening to. She hadn’t seemed young to me until the autumn of Bullets and Blood.
This realization happened at a party. We had two hundred people in the house for my parents’ anniversary. String quartet. Black tie staff. Open doors to our swimming pool with lotus blossoms and candles floating in it. Attendance was mandatory, so I had to tell Indy and Strat to get their laughs elsewhere.
All the family and business partners were there, all the wives clustered around the couches and most of the men hovering around the bar. Except Aunt Maureen. She never hung around the women. She was my “cool aunt” who ran a business and told the guy she’d been with for the past ten years that she saw no point in getting married. She was talking to my dad and a few guys in suits I knew by sight but not name. I was close by, hanging on every word, when I heard her say something about negotiations with a blue chip company. It was a bunch of numbers and percentages I understood because I remembered everything the adults in my family said about business. But at the end, she laughed.
The sound had a clear, tinkling quality her voice usually lacked. She sounded so young.
Wait. She was young.
She was eighteen years older than me. A little less, give or take. And that made my mother fifteen and change when she’d had me.
Over the ice sculpture and through the floral arrangement in the center of the ballroom, I looked at my father and did more math.
I almost laughed at the symmetry of it.
But it wasn’t funny. It took me too long to realize what had gone on, but I told myself I wasn’t going to be like my mother. I didn’t hate her, but I didn’t respect her either. She was from a good family. She was beautiful and smart. But she was nothing. She did nothing. Her life was a vacuum that purpose had fallen into, never to be seen again.
I wasn’t going to be that, but I was already on the way.
Me in my blue dress and little gold hoop earrings, dressed like a prim little miss. A chiffon-and-silk lie I let them believe. I felt sick.
I was thrown off balance by the impact of a small child. Fiona was five, and she had her arms wrapped around my legs. The others followed. Deirdre and Leanne hugged my legs too. Carrie and Sheila, at nine and eleven, stayed close, looking excited. I was only missing Theresa, who was a year old and had started walking two weeks ago. They looked up at me with eyes in varying shades of blue and green, hair from strawberry-blond to dark brown red. That was what happened when a redhead married a redhead, and my insides curdled like milk on the stove.
“Who’s watching you guys?” I was talking about everyone but directed the question at Carrie, the oldest of them and most likely to put together a coherent sentence.
“Everyone’s outside. Are you having cake or not?”
How long had I been staring into the middle distance?
Long enough for everyone to move to the garden, leaving a few clustered stragglers by the French doors. I let my little sisters lead me outside, where sibling hierarchy was determined by proximity to the cake. I’d lost any will of my own and hung behind all of them. I didn’t really want cake. I’d been sick to my stomach for days, fighting a headache, feeling tender everywhere, but I had a compulsion to act as if dessert mattered.
My mother and father stood behind the cake, smiling for the professional photographer. He wore an LA Times press pass. The camera was nowhere near me, but I felt exposed. They’d want a picture with me, and I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I could stay relatively anonymous in the world, but people read the pages of news about the Reagan presidency, Beirut, Studio 54 closing, and Hollywood celebrities. After those, but before the stock ticker, came the society page. Weddings. Anniversaries. Deaths of monied men.
My father tapped his glass with a spoon. He was over six feet tall and looked every bit the oligarch he was, with a full head of dark-red hair. My mother was more strawberry, and she held her head high when he was nearby. On that night in particular, she beamed a little brighter.
The guests quieted, and even the photographer put his camera down when Daddy raised his whiskey.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, projecting to the back of the room, “thank you for coming. I hope you’re all having a good time celebrating this, my anniversary with my beautiful bride.”
A chorus of tinkling rose as more spoons met glasses.
A great sound, I thought. They should try it in the studio.
My sinuses filled up, and I almost started crying, but my father kissed my mother quickly and went back to his speech.
“We have an announcement!”
Let’s hear it, Declan!
Hear! Hear!
“Eileen is about to make me a father for the eighth time!”
“Get off her, for Chrissakes!”
The shout from the back ended in uproarious laughter and cheers from everyone but the children, who didn’t understand it.
Except me. But I wasn’t a child. Never was, and never would be.
The photographer started snapping again. Dad and Mom indicated we should come behind the table so we could all smile in dot matrix patterns for tomorrow’s paper, and I couldn’t.
I’d hit my limit. I was going a hundred miles an hour, and the brick wall had appeared inches in front of me, without warning.
I’d taken a pregnancy test that morning. I’d put it away without looking at it and decided I wasn’t going to think about it. Not until after the party. Pretending bad things weren’t happening wasn’t like me, but then again, nothing bad had ever happened to me.
I’d bought it as almost a joke because my period wasn’t that regular. But it wasn’t funny.
The compulsion to look at the results weighed like a rock in my chest, exploding in slow motion. I had to hide before the shrapnel shredded me from the inside.
My room was a good three-minute expedition across the house, and I took it at a run, slipping on the marble and righting myself. I was crying hard by the time I reached my hallway. Somewhere in the journey, I’d let it go. Everything.
Oh god oh god oh god
I was a sensible person. I knew I had options, and the first step to exploring them was to know what was happening. The nausea and headaches. The tender breasts and belly. The feeling at the root of my hips that something was happening. I had to scratch pregnancy off the list so I could move to the next possibility, but I knew I wasn’t scratching shit off any list. I just knew.
And when they’d announced Mom was pregnant (again), I couldn’t wait another second.
When I got to my room, breathless in my pale blue dress, I slapped open the medicine cabinet where I’d left the little plastic jar. If the liquid was one color, I could forget the whole thing. If there was a brown ring at the bottom—
“Are you all right?”
I spun at the voice in the doorway, leaving my back to the open cabinet. My father stood in the doorway, still thrust forward from his run up the stairs.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Your mother thought you’d take it hard. I told her you were made of steel.” His smile was one hundred percent pride.
“I just ate something that didn’t agree with me.”
I spun and snapped the medicine cabinet door closed, but it bounced back, leaving an inch of the inside exposed. I turned back to my dad, hoping I wasn’t disrupting the liquid. Taking the test with eyedroppers and test tubes, I’d felt as if I were in lab class. I didn’t want to do it all again. And I didn’t want Dad to see it. And I didn’t want to be pregnant. And I wanted to rewind the whole thing, so I didn’t stupid my way through life.
“You’ve been so busy with your extracurriculars, your mother is worried.” His eyes left mine and went to the medicine cabinet. He wasn’t looking in the mirror. They traced the edge, moving up and down.
“I’m a little tired. Can I skip the cake?”
“Be back down in half an hour for pictures.”
His sharp expression meant that was an order. I could be green around the gills, and I’d be expected to smile for the camera.
“Okay.” I wanted him to go away.
He looked from behind me to my face, scanning it. I felt made of thin blown glass, hollow and transparent. Too fine. Too delicate. Worth too much to be broken without everyone I cared about getting upset over the loss.
I tilted my head down and went around him, to the doorway, where the promised comfort of my bed waited. He’d have to follow me out and leave me alone for thirty minutes. I could do a lot of calming down in half an hour.
I’d just stepped onto the carpet in my room. It was mauve and grey. And by the second step, the colors became a woolen blur as I was pulled back and spun around.
Dad’s face was beet red. He held a clear plastic vial in his left hand as he gripped my arm with his right. “What is this?”
“You’re hurting me.” I tried to squirm away, but he only gripped me tighter.
“What have you done?”
I was so scared I could barely think. My father had never raised a hand to me, but I’d always known there was an ocean of violent potential under his smooth veneer. A cold, deep sea that remained placid but was ever-threatening.
“It’s negative!” I shouted, not knowing if that was true. I hadn’t gotten a look into the vial before he stepped in.
“This?” He turned the vial toward me, open top to my face.
The yellow liquid had been slipped down. At the bottom, a brown ring of thicker membrane slid down, going elliptical before drooping into a line of accusation.
I didn’t have an answer. Not an excuse or reason. Nothing but an explanation of what I’d been doing with my free time, which I was sure he didn’t want to hear.
“Who is he?” Dad growled.
Wasn’t that the question of the year.
“Let go!”
“Were you raped?”
“What?”
“I’ll kill whoever did it.”
“Dad! No!” I was crying now. I hadn’t had enough time to process what I’d done to myself. I felt the spit and tears as if they were someone else’s. Dad’s face was lost in a wet, grey cloud, and my breath came in hard sobs. I choked out what I thought was a bit of reassurance. “It wasn’t rape.”
He twisted me around until I was facedown over my white footboard, the thin wood painful on my abdomen. While I was trying to navigate around that and the tears that flowed with the force of a storm, I felt a sharp pain on my bottom.
A strange clarity cut through my sobs, and my crying stopped as if I’d skidded to a stop at the edge of a cliff while the tears dropped to the bottom.
Dad spanked me again, and the impact turned breaths into grunts. I tried to turn, but he held me and whacked me again. I was confused, pinned. I looked around at him. His hand was raised with fingers flat, and elbow bent to strike me again, and he was looking at his hand as if it had done something he didn’t understand.
Then in that split second, he looked down at me, and we made eye contact. He saw me but didn’t. I didn’t know what he saw. I didn’t know what math he was doing in his head. The violent sea within him didn’t calm. It didn’t drain into a huge funnel and gurgle away, but the tide changed and moved like a lumbering beast, receding over the horizon to a place I couldn’t see.
He let me go. I slumped over the footrail. I took two deep breaths, and only the first one was an incomplete hitch.
I had neither choices nor time. My family, for all their money, was very Catholic, very rigid, very traditional. I had tons of privilege but no rights. So if I was going to abort this baby, it was now or never. Let them disown me.
I had to run away.