Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (16 page)

This argument was going through my head when I saw us next to each other in the mirror, me with inquisitive lines etched into my baby face, and Liz with an elegant posture. “Sure, I can kiss,” I blurted out. “Who doesn’t know how to do that?”

I’d never been kissed by a boy.

Liz didn’t answer right away. Instead, she planted one foot on the ground, turned it in opposition to the other to form fifth position, while she balanced her arms as if to hold a small chick in her hands; at least, that’s what she’d been told to do in class. I knew because long ago I had taken those classes, back when I believed a ballet teacher who said that I could do whatever I wanted.

“French kiss,” said Liz.

“What?” Was she baiting me? I’d never heard of this.

“I figured,” she said, drawing back and stretching her arms and her head to form an arch. Then she snapped forward and grabbed the bottles from the dresser. With an impatient sniff, she said, “Hold this.” She handed me one of the bottles. Closing the door behind her, she leaned her silky bun into it and barricaded the entrance.

“This is a French kiss,” she said. “Now watch.” She held the bottle to her lips and poked her tongue into its rim, wriggling it while tipping her head this way and that. There was a pop when she took it out. “Now you try,” she said.

I looked down at the bottle in my hands and tried to do exactly what she had done. It surprised me how smooth the rim felt against my tongue. With a thrust of my tongue, a brief rush of excitement came over me. To think I might do this with a boy! The bottle was sticky and sweet but I could not replicate that pop.

“You better keep at it,” she said, going up on her toes and evaluating her posture once again in the mirror. She made one pirouette en pointe, and left.

For all of my worry about dating, this first date was an unremarkable event until the kiss at my front door. That kiss sealed our fate as a couple. He grabbed me by the waist, and I stumbled into him just as he plunged his tongue deep into my mouth. His braces gnashed my upper lip and took a layer of skin with them as he pulled away. But it was behind me. I’d had my first date and my first kiss. For the remainder of my high school years this boy and I might have exchanged ten words, but I wore that torn lip into school on Monday morning like a badge of honor.

The rest of that year was a flurry of parties, football games, and dances. Even Liz invited me into her swanky lair, a bedroom with three white walls contrasting with a Kelly green one. Mine was still painted lavender from when we’d shared it as girls. From her bed, we blew cigarette smoke out the front window and listened to Simon and Garfunkel. When bored, Liz would say, “Call the pharmacy.” They would deliver anything. If they had sold alcohol, we would have ordered it. Instead I would ask for
Glamour
and
Vogue
; then, as if it were a last-minute thought, I would add, “Oh, and throw in a pound of peanut M&Ms and a carton of Kents, please.” We smoked our parents’ brand, not that we needed to cover our tracks. There was no one chasing us down.

Our parents were too tired and distracted to argue over our poor study habits, and we weren’t sure if they knew about our cigarettes. Dad had put in hard labor on our older siblings; his only interest these days was in keeping the boys’ grades up. Mom would see us going out—often together—and she’d give us a congratulatory nod.

Now, along with my plans to join a convent, my grades took a plunge. I decided that math, inextricably linked with Saint Vivian in my mind, was for future accountants. Phoebe and I held a contest to see who could score the lowest on an algebra test, and I won. I gave up my position in the glee club because Liz played volleyball and, instead of finding a ride home from someone in glee club, I became the scorekeeper for the volleyball team. I even stopped caring about Sister Anne Marie’s class. My parents scolded me for my report card that quarter but Liz pointed out, “They don’t know what they don’t see. Just snatch the report card from the mail before Dad comes home. He’ll never notice.” I tried that the next quarter, and the next; no one came looking for another report card from me, which led me to believe that I’d been going about life all wrong. I’d been working way too hard. People who coasted never seemed harried, and because of that they were a joy to have around. Daisy Buchanan, my latest idol, was a slacker. Had that hurt her popularity?

In the spring of my freshman year, I was called in to see the guidance counselor, who greeted me with the news that while my entrance exam scores had placed me in the top quarter of my class, my grades now placed me in the bottom quarter. I gave no explanation. Instead I focused on the symmetry in her statement: top quarter/bottom quarter. My thinking had become so magical that I imagined this was merely a matter of flipping quarters.

“This is not going to bode well for your college applications.” Until that moment, I had been feeling pretty good about my new life and what I was doing with it.

Shortly after that talk, a sophomore friend told me that Sister Anne Marie had mentioned Liz and me in her class as an example of how sisters
should not
treat each other. “Well, that is ridiculous,” I said with a laugh. “She must have seen us wrestling out here on the smoking patio last week. Everyone knows that was just for show. We were horsing around. Sister Anne Marie is too serious.” Dignified, I thought. Sister Anne Marie had conviction, and she cared enough about me to say something. But why would she say this to sophomores? Sister Anne Marie seemed an unlikely gossip. Or was this gossip? Was she instead trying to send me a message about my choices? If anyone knew how hierarchies worked it was Sister Anne Marie, the Richelieu scholar. Perhaps she’d wanted someone who was in neither Liz’s nor my class, but someone older, to relay this message to me.

The following year, instead of improving my studies or stepping out of my sister’s shadow, I gave up Phoebe. I decided that Phoebe was a pot person and I was an alcohol person. My future would be cut from the fabric of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, and hers from a Jack Kerouac one.

That fall I took up with a new friend, Claire. She lived in the neighborhood that Mom’s family had moved to after they left her grandfather’s house. Although this neighborhood had seen better days, I liked its older homes. Claire put no more effort into her homework than I did, but somehow she had the right answers when called upon in class. I couldn’t figure out how she did it, until I realized that she was about the most logical person I’d ever met. She just listened in class, applied reason, and came up with the answers on her own. Initially I’d assumed that Claire, with her broad shoulders and lean legs, was one of those athletic girls with whom I would have nothing in common. But Claire and I shared identical schedules because we’d chosen French and art as electives freshman year. She spoke in a husky voice, the kind that people took seriously, whereas I was still aiming for Daisy Buchanan’s persona: vulnerable on the surface, another story underneath. What story was under there I had not quite figured out. I hadn’t even understood that Daisy was a tragic character.

Claire and I sat next to each other in art class, and one day she said, “My mother’s an artist.” This surprised me, because I’d seen her mother when she showed up on campus in a golf skirt. She looked every bit as athletic as Claire. I couldn’t imagine an artistic golfer. So I said, “My mother went to art school. She is, or was, an artist. You know those pen-and-ink models for the Giddings Jenny ads?”

“She does those?” said Claire deferentially.

“She has done that
kind
of work.” I wanted to be more definitive. “Now she collects antiques.”

If there was one thing that we agreed on without qualification, it was that we both adored our art instructor. Sister Catherine was close to ninety years old and had to point to whomever she addressed because she couldn’t remember our names or bend her neck to face us. In her lectures on art history she elaborated on the sordid lives of the artists: this one who spent days alone in a studio with a pile of corpses for models, and that one who had sex with royalty. Sister Catherine salivated when she spoke of sex and death, which caused her to spit on words such as “corpse” and “succulence.” Once when we took out our sketchpads, she said to Claire with a poking motion, “Don’t forget, I taught your mother everything she knows. Your grandmother, too. I taught them both ... once upon a time.” And Claire whispered to me, “Don’t forget, I taught Jesus, too ... once upon a time.”

Now in our second year of classes together, there was nothing about Claire that I didn’t admire. Her drawings were beautifully executed, especially the geometric designs, while mine were a hodgepodge of anxious erasures and lines too thick or too crooked. The first time I held one up to her, Claire pursed her lips as she struggled to find words. We both had to laugh, and eventually she merely poked a finger at my erasures—her homage to our instructor. From then on, I came to class mostly to entertain Claire with my sketches and for Sister Catherine’s lectures.

At home I spent afternoons writing poetry, which I didn’t share. Then, one day in class, Claire confided her dream to become an architect, and I said, “That would be a good choice.” After some deliberation, I added, “I think I’m more of a writer.”

“And that’s a good thing,” Claire said, staring woefully at my ill-proportioned drawing of a table and chair. Then she looked me in the eyes and said, “I could definitely see you as a writer, Eileen.”

We shared a diverse clan of friends. Our group included a math whiz, a ballet dancer, a soloist from the glee club, a pianist, an equestrian, a few girls who smoked pot, three who worked in a concession stand of whom two played volleyball, four who skied, of whom three also played tennis, and a poet.

When I entered Claire’s house for the first time, it became clear why we had bonded. I followed her up the back staircase to find her mother passed out on a sofa, legs akimbo and hair matted to her cheek. I looked at Claire, who shrugged and explained, “She’s an alcoholic.”

“Oh,” I said, stunned by her candor. Then I blurted out, “Well, my mom has been locked up on a psych ward, but don’t tell Liz I said that.”

Claire had two things which I lacked. First of all, she was responsible. Her family had been upper-middle-class, but her father lost his job and finances were stretched thin, so Claire worked in a concession stand at the zoo. She bought her own clothes and art supplies. Secondly, her father was the best mother I’d ever met. He was forever baking cookies and quiches because he knew that his food would draw us down to the kitchen, where he would coax us to open up. He would slip bits of parental advice into the conversation without lecturing. In a satirical voice, he’d cajole us to tell him what we were up to: “Where were you two
ladies of the evening
off to last night? Have another cookie.”

Claire’s bedroom floor was layered two feet deep in clothes and junk. I spent weekends there for two years before I discovered the royal blue wall-to-wall carpeting underneath. Instead of nagging, her father taped sticky notes to her bedroom door:

Dearest Darling Clairish,

The fire department called about this business of your room: haven’t yet located the beds in there. Maybe you could shovel a pile of clothes aside for their hoses?

Cordially,

Adoring Father

Even as I teased “Clairish” about her father’s notes, I secretly envied them, especially in contrast to my mother’s “I-lean!” (It took no time for Claire to pick up on my mother’s intonation; from then on, Claire would always find the precise moment to slip in an “I-lean!”) While he was out of work, Claire’s father acted in a local theater troupe and starred in comedies. He enjoyed opera and the Boston Pops, which we watched with him on summer evenings. I had cherished those summer afternoons with Dad, tuning in to Joe Nuxhall and the Reds, but now I was hardly at home anymore. I wished I could be as close to my father as Claire was to hers.

I even admired Claire’s compassion for her mother, although I couldn’t understand it at the time. Claire’s mother showed up at mother–daughter luncheons drunk, and while Claire was mortified she also felt sad for her mother. I kept thinking Claire should be angrier about her mother’s drinking. Despite her family’s woes, their ills would not fester under a deadening silence, nor would they be dismissed as a joke. In Claire’s home, even disease might be forgiven.

She had almost no guidance from her mother during high school, but thanks to her father Claire kept her mother’s younger, healthier image alive in her memory. Also thanks to her father, Claire had more confidence and self-esteem than most of the fifteen-year-old girls I knew. Now that I was set loose to move about the city, in and out of friends’ homes, I was unconsciously building my ideal family from the examples around me. I wanted a family with a sense of humor, not unlike my own family, but one with more compassion and openness.

CHAPTER 13

Birth of Venus

W
hile I spent weekends with friends on the Eastside, the expansion of my family’s clan was well underway. Bridget, who was the “sweetheart” of her husband’s fraternity, moved with him to a “darling town” outside of Boston. Mom couldn’t wait to drive up to see their newborn baby—and pick up a few antiques along the way. Michael, a law student, was marrying the girl he’d been dating since Bridget and Rosa fixed them up in high school. My sister-in-law-to-be was Cincinnati’s answer to Christie Brinkley. Instead of appearing in the
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit edition, she sported a white tank suit with a pink monogram on her chest from the lifeguard’s chair at her country club.

As it turned out, while our mother complained about “those damn liberals,” she made exceptions. Bridget’s husband was a “Boston liberal,” but Mom adored him. Michael’s fiancée’s parents were friends and supporters of Governor Gilligan, another liberal. But Gilligan
had
graduated from St. Xavier High School, and the Gilligan Funeral Home was right across the street from Mom’s grandfather’s old house. Mom was already beaming with Irish pride while some of us recoiled at the prospect of Michael’s future in-laws’ wedding tradition: they took over the dance floor with an Irish jig culminating in the Notre Dame fight song. We considered this pride a bit aggressive, and as if the image of five Colleens and their parents circling in a jig wasn’t enough, this family danced around their only brother, who happened to be a priest
and
the assistant dean of the Notre Dame Law School.