Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss (8 page)

I turned the car around by the yacht club and started heading back. The lights of Windsor were just coming on across the lake: Canada—our unlikely neighbor. My father had once taken me to Niagara Falls. We’d spent the afternoons in the wax museums looking at life-size wax replicas of famous actors, then on barstools in the saloons where I’d sipped Shirley Temples and feasted on salty peanuts while my father had cocktails.

Now my father’s favorite bar was Gallagher’s. Ever since Stroh’s had expanded nationally by acquiring Schlitz and Schaefer, he’d begun to feel peripheral at work. I sometimes wondered if he’d been replaced without actually being fired. I knew he’d had no involvement in the new popular “Alex the dog” ad campaign, starring a golden retriever who fetched a can of Stroh’s Beer from the fridge for his owner, then drank it himself.

Then, when my father’s brother Gari was suddenly paralyzed by a riding accident, leaving him in a wheelchair with only slight movement of his neck, like Christopher Reeve, my father had declined even further. The two brothers had never seemed close, getting together only once or twice a year, but the accident had come as a huge blow to the entire family. Now I understood that my father felt things, deeper down, that he didn’t let on about.

Each day at noon my father left his office to have lunch at Gallagher’s and then camped out at the bar for the balance of the day. He came home in the evening as if he’d just left from work, wintergreen mints floating on his breath barely masking the scent of the booze.

Whitney and I usually stayed upstairs in our rooms during this witching hour and focused on our homework. Or at least pretended to. My father always entered through the side door, his footsteps falling heavily on the linoleum in the back hall, making my spine stiffen as I sat at my desk. Once he’d come into my room while I was writing a paper and had slapped me across the face, for no apparent reason. Later, he’d come back in, crying and apologizing. He was just drunk, he said.

The last of the evening light across the lake dissolved into black. There was nowhere else to go except home, though I wished I could just drive until I found the sun again, over the horizon beyond everything known or visible. I’d drive through wheat fields and cities and suburbs where other kids dreamed of leaving, and from there I’d keep going, never stopping until I came to that spot of sun I could sometimes see from this distance, or at least imagine was there.

T
he dinner dishes had already been stacked in the sink when I came into the kitchen. My uneaten portion remained in a pot on the stove—Chef Boyardee canned ravioli. Jell-O brand chocolate pudding cooled in glass cups on the countertop. A salad of iceberg lettuce wilting in a wooden bowl. It was the kind of food we ate when my mother hadn’t found time to grocery shop.

I took a fork from the drawer and speared the ravioli into my mouth straight from the pot. The pasta shell was still warm but the meat filling was stiff with cold. Sometimes my mother didn’t heat things all the way through.

I heard the clatter of my mother’s loafer heels on the dining room’s wooden floor.

“Where have you been, Frances?” she said as she came into the kitchen.

“Studying with Andrea,” I said automatically, still chewing over the stove. Andrea was my chemistry study partner, and I happened to be getting an A in chemistry.

“Andrea’s a nice girl,” my mother conceded. She went over to the sink and began rinsing the dishes, then loading them into the dishwasher. She wore a wool tweed skirt and a T-shirt with the word Bermuda across the front in pink script. The freckles on her calves danced chaotically as she sponged off the dishes. I watched the brownish spots with detached interest, hoping I could sleep in the aftermath of the acid. I planned to wake up at 4:30 a.m. to study for my math test.

I opened the refrigerator and stood staring at its contents.
A half-eaten honey-baked ham draped with foil, a macaroni-and-cheese casserole from the week before, three eggs.

My mother had either been at the real estate office (her new job), touring houses with clients, or playing backgammon. Both occupations had become her antidote to the bedlam at home while also helping to create it. And since she was the first woman in her family to work
and
to not have a cook, we were often left to forage.

“Is there anything else to eat?” I asked.

“I didn’t have time to go to the store today,” said my mother, switching on the disposal.

I was used to food being a last priority, but I was hungry. It had occurred to me more than once that if my father bought one fewer antique gun each year for his collection, we would surely be able to afford a cook, but the fact was, my parents didn’t care much about good food. Perhaps in rebellion against their more formal upbringings, my father subsisted on Domino’s pizza; my mother, on Campbell’s soup and Saltines spread with Jif. My father hated sitting at the dining room table, and who could blame him? His mother had used the evening meal as an occasion to berate her husband and criticize her sons. As for my mother, she had been kept in the kitchen at mealtimes with the cook until she was nine years old, while the rest of the family was served meals in the dining room.

“Can I order a pizza?” I asked my mother. I was staring at the missing child’s photo on the milk carton in the refrigerator. She was blond with home-cut bangs, maybe six years old. I wondered if they’d found her yet.

“I think Dad has some left over in the library,” said my mother.

I was always hungry. By the time I was ten, I had learned how to make a good omelet, chocolate mousse, popovers, and pasta with bottled sauce. I missed the chickens Ollie would sometimes roast before she left to go home in the evening. But Ollie was gone now, back in Detroit and living on welfare, and with her had gone any sense of order.

“Ollie has to take care of her mother full-time now,” my mother had told me.

I went into the library with a plate. My father sat in his leather chair, a remote in his hand, in his usual postwork outfit—khaki pants, dress shirt, and Topsiders with no socks. With his light-blue eyes and cleft chin, he looked like some famous actor whose name you couldn’t quite remember. A Domino’s box sat open on the floor at his feet with a half-moon of pepperoni pizza.

“Hi, Franny,” he said with an absent smile. “Been studying?”

“Of course,” I answered. My grades were good so my parents never hassled me about my whereabouts. “Test tomorrow.”

I placed a slice on my plate. My father was watching
The Incredible Hulk
. Ever since the show had premiered, my father had co-opted Bill Bixby’s famous line, “Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” offering up this threat whenever Whitney or I started to annoy him.

My father’s photographs, painstakingly shot and printed, sat in piles throughout the room, still in their envelopes. Oc
casionally one landed in a frame, either at our house or someone else’s, and the rest would eventually go into boxes, and the boxes into the attic. My father’s eighty or so cameras cluttered the clothes and linen closets.

The tragedy of my father’s life was contained in those dust-covered boxes. We hardly spoke about it, except when my mother would say, “Dad is so talented. He really should do more with his photography.”

I’d grown up under the weight of all those unseen photographs and unused cameras, its burden so pervasive that even the air in our house seemed to have texture and mass. I observed my father on weekends in endless rounds of cleaning cameras and restacking print piles, or looking in vain for some shot of me on the terrace made the previous summer, to no avail. The mess just grew bigger, engulfing the pantry, then the kitchen, then the library, as my father was defeated by his own inability to edit, file, and catalogue.

Maybe the saddest story of my father’s life was a missed meeting with his great idol, the renowned
Life
magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, who was scheduled to be on Martha’s Vineyard in the summer of 1962, at the same time my parents planned to be there with Bobby and Charlie, just toddlers at the time. My father allegedly wrote Eisenstaedt a letter telling him he would like to meet. Taken with my father’s enthusiasm for his work, Eisenstaedt responded that he’d meet my father at Gay Head beach; he named the date and time, but when the day came around, my father lost his nerve and stood his hero up.

The story was told and retold in our family, usually by my
mother, and soon took on the proportions of a mythical lost chance, coming to symbolize the tragedy of my father’s unfulfilled potential. I always imagined Eisenstaedt standing alone on the beach at dawn, a tangle of Leica cameras around his neck, searching the coast for my father’s lone figure in the mist.

Now my father was reviving his lost dreams through me. “You’re a better photographer than I am,” he liked to tell me. He loaded me up with equipment and encouraged me to photograph professionally, as he wished he had done. Since I was good at shooting people, I thought I might be a fashion or editorial photographer. I read
Rolling Stone
and
Interview
,
Vogue
and
Vanity Fair
. I studied the images, practiced the different styles. I was always experimenting. I felt as if I were tipping the scales of my father’s lost chances by living the life he should have lived.

But my father’s enthusiasm and support were something on which I could rely only when his mood was right. Other times, the house shook with his fury, and I turned to my camera, heading into Detroit or setting up shoots at friends’ houses. The world through the lens was reduced to a manageable rectangle, and no chaos could penetrate the solace of the darkroom. Watching the clock while my prints developed and fixed lent predictability to my life, and I could cut a mat with the exactness of a surgeon. At the same time, my images were unpredictable, even mystifying; I never saw in my film what I thought I had through the viewfinder. I saw something realer, truer, as if separating a piece of the world from itself could somehow make the whole thing better.

FRANCES STROH, 1984

(by Eric Stroh)

W
hitney and I had been lying around the house all day, watching MTV and microwaving Stouffer’s frozen French bread pizzas. The August air swelled with the metallic scent of an imminent thunderstorm. My father puttered around the house with his cameras, polishing lenses and blowing Dust-Off at me every time I walked past him in the kitchen.

He sat down and pulled a fish-eye lens out of its leather case. “Hi, Franny,” he said warmly when I glanced over his shoulder. “Got another party tonight?”

It was the summer after my senior year, and I had been out every night. My father let me drive his Voyager minivan, even though I had totaled his Buick just a few months before, resulting in emergency surgery to eradicate the hematoma trapped inside the shattered cartilage of my nose. “It’s Spence’s birthday,” I said.

Spence was my boyfriend that summer. The boyfriend who’d blown his entire summer-job salary to keep us both high on coke.

“Just don’t wreck my car,” my father said with a teasing smile. He reached out and tweaked my nose. He was in a good mood. “Make sure to avoid that fictitious dog, too, hunh?” He loved pointing out that he hadn’t bought my alibi the previous winter that I’d swerved his silver Skylark sedan into a telephone pole—on the opposite side of the road—to avoid hitting a golden retriever.

“There
was
a dog,” I said with a straight face.

“Right.”

It was a dark morning in January that the wreck had happened. Partying our way through the inevitable depression of a Michigan winter, my friends and I had been out all night, then attended a sunrise meditation class at the Hare Krishna mansion in Detroit. The “Krishna center” was located on the sprawling estate of the Fisher Mansion, one of the old Detroit houses emblematic of the automotive industry’s heyday, donated to the sect by Alfie Ford.

Meditation, music, drugs, and alcohol, they were all facets of the same mind-expanding trajectory—especially potent when combined. My friends and I had all read
On the Road
and
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
. And with the help of state-of-the-art amphetamines and a healthy dose of cynicism we had taken the legacy of the fifties and the sixties to new heights—in the eighties.

The Corinthian pillars of the meditation hall were edged in gold. A robed, pot-bellied man with a Krishna ponytail sat lotus style facing the large group. We sat down in our stocking feet and tried to look spiritual. Sweet-smelling incense burned in all four corners of the vast room.

And now the chanting began. I glanced around at the other meditators as their voices rose. A beautiful woman with a shock of buzzed orange hair was sitting alongside us, cross-legged:
Annie Lennox
, her knee just inches from mine. Recognizing her immediately, we broke into ecstatic, wide-eyed smiles. We were living a cultural moment, absorbing her palpable aura of celebrity, metabolizing a cocktail of gorgeous chemicals, chanting “
Hare Rama
,
Hare Rama
,
Krishna
,
Krishna
,
Hare Hare
. . .” We had finally arrived. Annie was stunning, younger than we would have thought, and, amazingly, a real person. Her voice converged with ours like a train escalating to the heavens, echoing off the baroque, gold-leafed ceiling of the Fisher Mansion ballroom with the rapturous beat of life itself.

After the meditation class, my friends and I popped codeine tabs to soften the landing, then trudged through the snow back to my father’s car.

The roads were thick with ice; the overcast January sky hung low like the dark concavity of an overturned bowl. I started the engine. Road conditions never worried me, even in blizzards. I could drive on ice blindfolded. I accelerated quickly, skidding against the curb.

“Whoa!” everyone shouted, laughing. They smoked and debated the age of Annie Lennox, seat belts still unbuckled.

The lawns were buried under filthy old snow. No other cars on the road. I accelerated again, feeling the pedal give obediently beneath the stiff leather sole of my right cowboy boot.

Brick houses whipped past us in blurs of reddish brown.
The car heater roared with cold air. I pulled a Marlboro from my pack. No one could find the lighter, so someone in the backseat just held out a lit cigarette. I turned around and leaned into the back, my left hand still on the wheel, my starved lungs drawing on that fragile point of light with mighty focus—the last burning ember within miles—but my cigarette didn’t catch right away, and that’s when it happened.

We slammed to a stop with a great exploding sound, our bodies thrown backward as if from an electric shock. Then everything stopped again.

A telephone pole, I saw, stood inches from my face, just beyond a windshield web of shattered glass. The front of the car was an accordion of crushed steel. I was still in the driver’s seat. We were all still in our seats.

“SHIT
,” everyone said at once. We were alive, though.

My father put his lens back into the side pocket of his camera bag and buttoned it shut.

“What kind of dog did you say it was, again, Franny?” He asked me, still amused.

I picked up the Dust-Off and blew some air at the back of his head.

“Hey—Stop that!” he shouted good-humoredly. He glanced around. “Where the hell did your mother go, anyway?”

“No idea,” I answered. My mother’s mysterious absence was hardly unusual; she had been out even more since my father quit his marketing job at the brewery after a fight with my uncle Peter.

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.