I'll Scream Later (No Series) (8 page)

F
IRST KISS
. W
HEN
I was twelve, with an adorable kid named Tony. He was African-American and we were in the same grammar school class and the same theater group at the center. We kissed with his sister Paula standing there between us trying to coach us.

That kiss was incredible. It was great.

First boyfriend. Randy—a great gentleman even though he was a junior in high school. Low-key and had a great smile, handsome. He was the only Deaf boyfriend I would ever have. Randy asked me to homecoming that year, which for a freshman was just heaven.

We dated for about seven months, but around this time I was having growing feelings for my neighbor Bob Michels, so I broke up with Randy. Bob, who was also a couple of years older than me, was so nice, always looking out for me, and he was really great at sports, which made him even more attractive than he already was. We both had feelings for each other but more on my part than his, though he says now we had crushes on each other.

Either way, nothing was to come of it. That summer I went away to camp, and when I got back, the day I got back, one of the neighborhood girls asked me, “So how are you and Bob doing? I saw you guys in the car last week.” Last week? I was in camp.

My heart was broken as only a fourteen-year-old girl’s heart can be, which means madly, terribly, desperately.

I recovered by seeing Rick—he was not good for me. Older, a drug addict, rode a motorcycle. He was twenty-three, I was fifteen and would sneak out of the house at two in the morning to be with him. I did so much partying with Rick. My friends and I
would meet up with him and get wasted on combos of drugs and alcohol.

My parent despised him, though they never tried to stop me from dating him. It was a crazy, exciting time that I’m glad I survived. Rick didn’t last long because I would, for the first time in my young life, truly fall in love.

I
MIGHT NOT
believe in love at first sight if I hadn’t known Mike. But we just looked at each other and knew, absolutely, that we would be together.

Technically, I guess it was love at second sight. The first time I saw Mike I was in fifth grade when he and a buddy chased me, and Liz, home from the playground.

We bumped into each other again the first day of a driver’s ed class. After a few classes we went over to his house with his girlfriend and a dear friend of mine named Dave. I remember we were smoking a lot of pot that day, which was starting to be a habit with me.

Mike—my first love

Mike told his girlfriend to wait at the house, that he would be right back. Then he told me and Dave we were going for a drive. In the car, Mike looked at me and said, “When I come back to the house, I’m going to drop her and you’re going to be mine.” Dave sat in the backseat and rolled his eyes and shrugged his shoulders.

Mike remembers, “God, she was gorgeous, every guy’s dream…boobs and a butt, and I liked that she was a smart-ass. We were both kind of troublemakers. We were happy doing anything, we’d walk out the door and do anything, go anyplace and have a good time.”

Mike and I would date for four years. I think everyone expected us to get married, and for a while I definitely did. I know it broke his heart when it was over, as it did mine. He will always have a special place in my heart, and I was so glad that he fell in love again, and now Mike and Cindy have a beautiful son, named Sam, just a few months older than my daughter, Sarah.

M
IKE AND
I started having sex pretty quickly. I remember being downstairs in my house with Mike one night and he said, “You know we’re too young to be pregnant, so we need to do something about it.”

“Okay, wait a second.”

I headed upstairs.

It was about ten thirty at night. My mom was in bed, reading the newspaper and smoking a cigarette. I walked in and said, “Mom, I’m having sex with Mike.”

“Okay, I’ll take you to the doctor tomorrow for birth control pills.”

Then she went back to her newspaper.

The next day, she took me to the doctor’s office. I didn’t know what was happening, had no idea that there would be an examination and what that would be like. My mom didn’t explain anything to me.

I do remember the doctor being extremely caring, and my parents paid for my birth control pills for years, and I thank them for that. I never got pregnant until I had my first child. Never con
tracted any sort of sexually transmitted diseases. I know now that I was irresponsible and lucky.

The birth control story always stands out in my mind as what is broken in my relationship with my mom.

I hardly ever remember my mother explaining anything to me, whether it was birth control or why I couldn’t have another piece of candy. The only thing she would tell me was that she would kill herself if I ever died in a car accident—that was on the day I got my driver’s license. I guess she considered that motivation for me to be careful.

The blanket incident has also stayed with me all these years. I had a blanket I got as a baby, my favorite one. Like Linus in
Peanuts,
I carried it around when I was younger. As I grew older, I still didn’t want to let it go—I needed the blanket and a thumb to get to sleep at night. It made me feel safe.

One Saturday night when I was eleven (I know, I know…I was too old for a blankie!), my parents were out as usual and it was time for me to go to bed. I couldn’t find my blanket anywhere. The babysitter and I looked everywhere for it, all over the house, inside the laundry basket, outside, even in the garbage. I was in tears. Hysterical!

When my parents came home that night, I was still up. “Where is my blanket?”

“We don’t know.”

After many tears—I was close to inconsolable—they finally confessed that my mother had thrown it away. No conversations, no “Marlee, you’re getting older and it’s time to put this away.” Or planting a seed that it was time to start letting go. Nothing, no warning, it was just gone.

W
E HAVE ALWAYS
had a complicated family dynamic that was often strained in ways that had nothing to do with my deafness. After I moved out, I would get long letters from my dad that were versions of a thousand conversations we had had at home when I was growing up. Here’s an excerpt from one he wrote in the summer of 1987 that is pretty typical of the way it would go:

Me and my mom

Somehow the entire responsibility for whether my relationship with my mother was working seemed to fall on my shoulders. It was that way when I was a child, then a teenager, and remains that way now.

I still have the photo album that carries the legacy of one of those fights with my mom—about half of my childhood pictures were ripped out and thrown away because she was mad at me that day.

I keep looking back, searching for those moments of guidance, the ones where parents teach their children about life and relationships, where they talk about the future, about what kind of person
you should try to grow up to be. I can’t find them in my life. Those were not our conversations.

I don’t want anyone to misunderstand. I love and applaud my parents for keeping me at home rather than handing me off to an institution. I am so grateful to my mother for driving me to doctors, for keeping me involved in theater at ICODA while I was growing up, for encouraging me to make friends—driving me to meet them in the middle of a blizzard, a hurricane, a hailstorm—if I asked her to. She cooked me great meals, shopped for clothes with me, and I loved to shop.

But so many times in my life I simply wanted to understand more about life, about her life, her interests, politics, the world, anything. Those are the times I wished she had been there for me, too.

I love my dad hugely—he’s funny and irreverent and I know that he loves me. I am grateful for all the ways he pushed me—whether it was to order french fries for myself or to ride a roller coaster. But he has spent a lifetime never recovering from the dark days of his childhood. Then he faced the rocky road of family life that my deafness only heightened. At some point, I became the one person that he thought could change the way his life was going. I couldn’t.

When I was a child, I think much of my anger was a desperate cry for someone to step up and be the adult in my life who would take my hand and take the time to explain this incredibly complex world for me. I am trying to walk a different path with my children, and I hope that I succeed. And I couldn’t ask for a better father for my children than my husband, Kevin. He’s an absolute natural at it.

Sometimes I think that all of us—Eric, Marc, and me—were in so many fundamental ways left to fend for ourselves, certainly emotionally. I’ve watched as we have struggled to mature as adults, to find ourselves and find some peace with the past.

We are, the three of us, in a far better place today—with ourselves, our careers, and with each other. We grow closer every year with our families so tightly connected. There is love and a
growing respect and appreciation for each of our lives, our successes, our differences. We are increasingly, in all the best ways, there for each other, learning to cherish each other. And for that I am so grateful, too.

With my parents, for me at least, it remains difficult emotional terrain. My mom and dad both keep waiting for me to write a different story for all of our lives.

They still don’t understand—whether it was Marlee the child, or Marlee the adult—I never had that power in my hands. If we are going to write a different story as a family, it can only happen if we do it together. And I worry that we are running out of time.

W
HEN
I
WAS
in eighth grade, Liz and I decided to try out for cheerleading.

Two Deaf girls…the judging panel just looked at us—totally deadpanned.

Liz definitely had the edge here—she was a really terrific gymnast. For one of the routines during the tryouts, we were supposed to do splits—the big finale. No problem for Liz, but me? I’d never even tried to do splits. But I wanted a spot on the cheerleading team so badly that when it came time for us to do the splits…I did! Yeowch!!!!

I thought we were pretty good, but I think they rated us a one on a scale of one to five, or maybe one to ten. I guess I’ve had better days.

High school for me was John Hersey High School in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Go, Huskies! All in all, it was a series of misadventures and a lot of drugs.

I dropped out of ICODA; I was too busy with the social life that came with high school. Parties, dances, concerts, movies, roller-skating at the Axel, just hanging out.

Hanging out meant doing a lot of drugs. I never really liked alcohol, didn’t like the taste of it, but early on in high school I definitely gave it a serious try. My friends and I would play quarters with a bottle of rum. We’d finish the bottle and then we’d drive.

I remember once stopping to get some gas and we put $5 in the tank. I had a $5 bill in my hand to pay for it. After I drove away, I realized I still was holding that five bucks. Wow, I was so drunk I had forgotten to pay. I got home and I never drank and drove again. Thank God I came to that conclusion.

Drugs were my thing. I dropped acid, loved quaaludes—714 Lemmon. I loved sleeping beauties, downers, and then speed. With speed, I would cross a line and sell it, too. I had a friend who almost OD’d on angel dust, so I stayed away from that. For some reason I decided that I wouldn’t even try cocaine while I was in high school—and I never considered heroin, didn’t like the idea of needles.

But pot was a staple in my life. Now I can’t believe I ratted out my brothers when they were growing pot in the crawl space down in the basement when I was a kid. I was looking for Hanukkah presents and found the plants and the lights…

I could easily smoke twenty joints a day when I was in high school. When I didn’t have it, I wasn’t a happy girl.

I had my first joint just before my freshman year of high school. A Deaf friend named Dave gave it to me. I felt that I was a part of this special group now. It felt great.

I still remember that first joint, the first taste of it. We were walking along the street, a police car was right there, and I was so high. I lay down in the middle of the street, just laughing my head off. Then I noticed that the cop was watching me and I tried to casually get up and keep on walking. Glad he thought,
Silly girl, go on!

I
N HIGH SCHOOL
everything got more hard-core.

I smoked pot before school, on lunch breaks, after school. I would smoke in my room with the windows open, even when it was twenty below, trying to wave the smoke out. Then I thought,
What do I have to lose?
So I smoked, windows closed, pot smoke hanging heavy in the air, and when I was done, I’d walk out of the room. Sometimes my dad would be there in the hallway, and he would just look at me and say, “Stop smoking,” then leave.

I’d leave bongs all over my room. No one said anything. My parents never walked in while I was smoking pot, so I don’t know if they were afraid to confront me or were just used to it since both my brothers had been stoners, too.

I stole money from my dad to buy the pot and the pills. I knew
he played cards every Thursday night, and he’d usually come back with a wad of cash. I’d slip in there around six on Friday morning, before he was awake, and lift one or two twenties. Every week. He probably knew, but he never said anything to me about it.

Maybe it was my parents’ way of coping with a situation they felt was completely out of their control. The only time anything at all was said was when my dad would bring home a new car for me and tell me he had dumped the water out of the bong I’d left in the trunk and put it in the trunk of the new car.

F
ROM THE TIME
I had friends with cars, I was hanging out too long and too late.

My way of breaking curfew was to call my parents on the phone and say I was still out, didn’t know where, but wanted to let them know I’d be late. Click. Dial tone. My dad says, “It drove me nuts because you couldn’t say anything. She couldn’t hear you. I’d just be standing there after she called, holding the phone, angry as hell.”

But one night my dad told me to be home by eleven. I didn’t call. It was eleven, then midnight. My parents panicked. They called the cops.

A friend dropped me off around 3 a.m., drunk. A couple of police cars were still parked outside my house. Oh, this was bad. The first thing my parents heard was a car door slam, then an engine gunning and the screech of tires.

I went in storming. I figured it was the best defense if I got angry before they did. “How could you do this, how could you call the cops?”

A detective was at the kitchen table—he made me sit down. I was still being a wise ass when he slammed his hand down on the table and said, “You think your parents are crazy? Do you know we found the head of a fifteen-year-old two blocks from here in Harms Woods?”

It was not a good night for anyone.

One of the things that sticks with me about that night is that during the fight my mom was yelling at me, “You have no idea how much I love you.”

In the years since, I’ve tried to remember if she ever told me she loved me other than in the middle of a fight. I only remember hearing those words from her when she was angry—for years I connected her love with anger. I guess I still do.

It was never just out of the blue, just looking across and seeing me and telling me she loved me. Never. She never put me to bed or read me a book, that I can recall. She never got me water in the middle of the night—that was my dad.

I think that’s why today I hug my kids to distraction, cover them in kisses. My husband and I make time to talk to them every day about what’s going on in their lives. Whenever I leave town, just before I go out the door, I have to kiss each of the kids.

It’s become a ritual, and it’s important to me. I realized how important one morning when I had to leave and Isabelle, my youngest, was sleeping upstairs. I kissed Sarah, Brandon, and Tyler, then got in the limo. We’d gotten a couple of blocks from the house when I remembered Isabelle—upstairs, asleep, unkissed. I had to go back. The driver turned the car around and raced back—there was a plane to catch—and waited while I ran upstairs and kissed my baby.

I never want them to have to wonder for even a second about my love for them. And I never want them to think that love is angry.

M
IKE WAS THE
best thing about my life in those years. We would smoke pot, and we did have sex, but what overshadowed all of that was a consistent sense of being totally, absolutely loved. We were best friends, too.

I loved being with him, and I loved the sex, because it felt good. But I loved being someone who mattered in his life. I never doubted that for a second.

We just got each other. I understood him and he understood me. He needed as much love as I did. Beautiful guy. Heavy, heavy drinker. But he had so much love to give. I cooked for him, helped with his homework, and if I drove his beloved car, I was very, very careful. He would spend his last dime sometimes to buy me flowers—my favorites were the carnations that were dyed blue. We had
pet names for each other. I remember them still, but that’s something I’m going to keep to myself. And I hope Mike does, too.

We went through a lot together, growing and struggling through those teenage years. Figuring out how to have a relationship with someone. It was a heavy time. Crazy.

I didn’t see my parents as role models for what I was looking for in a relationship.

I don’t remember seeing my parents kiss. One time I asked my brother Marc, “Do they love each other?” He said they had sort of a love/hate relationship. I’d see them laughing together and that was always a good feeling. When they would go to parties, they always danced swing. They were good at it and I loved seeing them dancing together. I think I hung on to those small signs to reassure myself that our family was okay, that it wouldn’t break apart.

I don’t think my mom ever felt comfortable in her own skin. She was always good at putting herself together, dressing with a kind of style, but she was always changing the color of her hair—as if she was trying to find her identity, trying to like herself. When she felt good about herself, she was great. But that didn’t happen often.

Whatever ups and downs my parents had, I know all my friends loved them and hanging out at my house. My friends would stop by whether I was there or not.

Mike remembers, “My dad died a couple of years before I started dating Marlee. And I thought her dad was the coolest dad in the world. He’d slip me a twenty or forty and say, ‘Go get sandwiches and see a movie.’ He helped me buy my first car when I didn’t have anything.

“It broke my heart when me and Marlee broke up. I lost Marlee, but I also lost her family.”