Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (32 page)

When his appeals to morality couldn’t produce a cure, Dad tried to reason with Geri directly. He pleaded with her: “Please, Geri, tell me what’s wrong.”

“
Stop bugging me, Dad.”

He begged her to modify her “attention-getting” behavior.

She scowled at him.

He kept pleading: “Why are you acting this way, Geri?”

The harder he tried, the more frustrated Mom became. Mom felt that Geri was just plain ill. But Mom could never find quite the right words to express exactly how she felt about the illness, which even the doctors of the 1960s could never satisfactorily explain. The more Dad tried to have a logical conversation with Geri, the more Mom wanted to tell him that logic was not the answer. But the words didn’t come out that way.

“
You can’t
reason
with her,” Mom interrupted Dad.

Geri growled at Mom.

Dad defended Geri’s God-given capacity to reason. “I’m trying to talk sense to her.”

“
You
can’t
talk sense to her,” Mom raised her voice. “She’s not
like
the other kids!”

“
Stop yelling at me!” Dad yelled. “And stop yelling at Geri! Yelling doesn’t do anyone any good!”

Mom groped and stammered. When thoroughly frustrated with her inability to convey an idea, she simply repeated the same thing but louder and with more feeling. “You can’t
reason
with her!” she shouted with full force of emotion. Maybe that way Dad would finally get the message that Geri needed more help than they could provide.

Dad heard a very different message. He suspected that Mom was committing the greatest sin of all: the sin of rejecting her own daughter. “We can’t just wipe our hands of her!” he shouted back at Mom in furious indignation.

“
That’s not what I’m saying!” Mom cried.

“
Then think before you speak, dammit!”

Whenever Dad and Mom tried to explain the unexplainable illness to one another, they were almost bound to misunderstand one another. The illness could be neither accurately interpreted as a moral issue nor adequately explained in emotional terms.

Part of the problem was the inescapable fact that Dad and Mom needed to speak to each other in English. His first language was Polish. Her first language was Music. He was in no good position to infer the pained or subtle meanings behind her words. So he scolded her—if not for rejecting her own daughter, then for speaking so recklessly. Mom then felt belittled—if not by his misinterpretations, then by his condemnations. Whatever she said could never be good enough, just like she could never speak well enough in Italian like La Ida could.

Dad kept blaming Mom for rejecting Geri. Mom kept blaming Dad for rejecting reality. Dad and Mom kept blaming each other for not accepting Geri for who she was.

Then they blamed each other’s families. “She looks like
your
side of the family,” said Dad. “Her illness could be linked to your mentally retarded relative in Farindola.”

“
All the crazy people are on
your
side of the family,” Mom countered. “Just look at your father!” she screeched.

That touched a raw nerve. “Don’t you talk that way about my father!” he howled. “He saved me from the Nazis!”

“
Oh, that’s a load o’ horseshit!” she jerked her head from left to right.

“
Zhona!!” he bellowed in Polish. He called Mom not by her name but by “zhona,” which means “wife” in Polish. “Zhona, why do you always have to use such barnyard language?”

“
Oh, piss on it!”

And so forth.

Dad suspected that the devil must have been working overtime. So late one night, Dad attempted to exorcise Geri. He entered her room as she lay in her bed. Holding a crucifix over her body, he issued the commandment, his throat trembling yet stern: “Satan, be gone!” He repeated the commandment several times. “Satan, be gone!”

Geri, half asleep, rocked under the covers.

All appeals to morality, reason, blame, or Satan failed to solve the problem. More likely, they made it worse. The more that Dad or Mom issued any such appeals—by pushing Geri to explain her recalcitrant or disorderly behavior, by trying to explain it to her themselves, by blaming each other or each other’s families for her behavior, by comparing her to the other children, or by suggesting that something was diabolically wrong with her—the more she burst into deafening screams and uncontrollable rage.

Her years of singing practice had made those screams sound like something superhuman. But they weren’t the screams of a monster. They were the screams of horror. And there probably couldn’t have been any healthier or more appropriate response. There could be few sources of anguish more wrenching than knowing that you’re losing control of your own mind and can’t do a damn thing about it.

Nobody could argue with Geri’s screams.

The family dramas often played themselves out around the dinner table. No matter how careful the preparations before the meal, chaos prevailed on many levels.

The dinner table had been specially built, cut, and shaped to seat the eight of us around its rectangular Formica surface with rounded corners. Genie set the table each night with eight unbreakable Corelle dishes. She put the utensils in their proper places and laid potholders exactly where she knew Mom would place her big roaster pans.

The adjacent kitchen, meanwhile, was Mom’s church. Everything there had been duly consecrated. The windowsill above the kitchen sink was her pedestal for a pantheon of plastic saints and martyrs. The oven was her altar. The nightly meal was nothing less than the holy sacrament of Communion. It was imperative that everyone attend.

Dad came home from a hard day’s work at Scientific Data Systems, seeking peace and quiet. We heard him hoist open the garage door, and that was our 60-second warning to stop whatever we were doing, wash up for dinner, be quiet, and hold our breath.

Mom knew very well that Dad sought solace in her church. She didn’t want to desecrate it, either. Therefore, she scampered out of the kitchen, with her apron fluttering at her sides, to greet him
before
he entered her church so that she could unload on him all of the bad things that had happened that day and get it all over with in the garage as soon as he parked the car and turned off the engine. “Geri nearly burned down the house today!” Mom caught her breath. “Genie wants money for a rock concert!! And Stan says she’s playing hooky from school and hanging out with boys at the beach!!!”

“
Zhona!” Dad groaned as he stepped out of the driver’s seat. “I haven’t EVEN gotten into the house, and you’ve ALREADY made my stomach turn!”

Each of us sat in our assigned seat at the dinner table. Dad sat at the head of the table beneath a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” Mom sat at the opposite head of the table closest to the kitchen. Three of us kids sat on either side.

The duty of saying grace before meals rotated nightly around the table. Once we gave thanks to the Lord, we broke into conversation that was mostly predictable.

Stan, 16 going on 17 in the spring of 1969, talked about money, the stock market, fancy cars, and the riches he planned to earn as a dentist. He sat immediately to the left of Dad. The two of them pored over the business section of the afternoon paper,
The Daily Breeze
, and checked where each of their stocks stood at the end of each day. “We gotta get some of that IBM, Dad!” Stan salivated.

Genie, 15, sat at the opposite corner diagonally across from Stan and immediately to the left of Mom. Genie argued with Dad and Stan whenever she could poke a hole in their conventional wisdom. “Why does hair have to be short on boys?” she railed against the establishment. “Why do dresses have to be long on girls?”

Nobody gave her good answers.

Geri, 14, sat immediately to the right of Dad and directly across from Stan. Geri was the most unpredictable person at the table. Sometimes, she kept quiet and ate her dinner. Even then, she was tense, clenching her fists and suspicious of those around her. We never knew when the volcano might erupt. We knew only that it erupted pretty often.

In the middle of the meal one night, Geri grumbled something to herself, sullen.

“
Whatever, Geri,” Stan replied in a dismissive tone.

That really set her off. She arched her shoulders and squeezed her fists as tight as she possibly could. Her knuckles turned as white as her plate.

“
Why are you clenching your fists so tight?” Mom asked. “Why do you do that?”

Geri reluctantly unclenched her fists, but her shoulders remained arched. She then grasped the sides of her brimming plate and lifted it straight up in the air above her head. She held the plate aloft for two suspenseful seconds before slamming it straight down onto the table, shattering the supposedly unbreakable Corelle dish, and sending the shards and food flying across the table at the rest of us.

“
Oh, my God!” just about everyone dodged, yelled, and screamed. “What’d you do that for?!”

Geri raised her frightened eyes and looked around the table at everyone, evidently as stunned as anyone by what she’d done. She then opened her mouth as widely as possible, inhaled a huge scoop of air, and started wailing. Pushing her chair behind her, she stood up and fled to her bedroom. She reached an ear-shattering, bone-chilling climax of slamming her bedroom door over and over again and howling in sorrow with each long breath that came from a place way deep down within her diaphragm.

“
Zhona, did you really need to provoke her like that?”

“
What’d I do wrong?” Mom threw up her hands. “How come it’s my fault?”

“
It isn’t!” Genie insisted. “It’s Stan’s fault. He’s the one who lit the fuse.”

“
Would everyone please stop making such a federal case out of everything?” interjected the 12-year-old Joe. He sat between Genie and Geri.

The table settled down momentarily.

Mary Jo, who was almost ten, sat directly across from Joe and between Stan and me. She went virtually undetected as she slipped scraps of meat to our chihuahua, Taco, who sought cover beneath her chair. A born vegetarian, Mary Jo never cared for the taste of meat, and so she furtively slid her hand beneath her seat and delivered morsels of flesh to the diminutive dog waiting elatedly below. Taco ate a lot of filet mignon.

I contributed to the disorderly routine without saying a word. At the age of seven, my eating habits became immensely annoying to Mom. It bothered her to no end that I refused to eat my food in turns—corn-rice-meat, corn-rice-meat—and that I preferred, instead, to eat all of the corn and then all of the rice and then all of the meat. That ungodly habit violated some secret, sacrosanct code of the familial feast, something about letting all of the flavors blend together and enhance one another. The most flagrant violation of all was when I dared to separate each layer of her homemade lasagna masterpieces, first scraping off the garlicky meat-and-tomato sauce on top, then peeling away the crowning layer of velvety egg noodle, then tugging at the gooey mozzarella below, then scooping out the fluffy ricotta hiding beneath the mozzarella—and then starting all over again as I methodically excavated my way down to the bottom of the plate, layer by luscious layer.

It drove Mom crazy. Here she had worked so hard to put everything together, and there I was pulling it all apart. I wanted only to savor the full flavor of each wonderful ingredient, and I couldn’t figure out why that somehow ruined the dinner. But I was shamelessly dishonoring the one ritual—cooking and eating—for which Mom had sole responsibility and over which she was determined to retain sole control. She couldn’t articulate her feelings in the heat of the moment, so she just blasted. “Stop that!” she flailed her hands by her sides. “Don’t eat your food that way!” she swung her head from left to right. Mom didn’t talk with just her hands. She talked with her whole body.

Only Genie, my big rebellious sister who sat directly across from me, could come to my defense: “What difference does it make how he eats his food?!”

Mom couldn’t answer. She knew something was wrong but couldn’t put it into words. She kept opening and closing her mouth, but nothing came out.

Good thing for me that Genie had some claim to moral authority in the dining room. She was the one who always had to get down on her hands and knees to scrub the linoleum floor.

Even the dog became a troublemaker.

Taco loved Mom the most. In the playroom after dinner, the black, long-haired chihuahua curled up into Mom’s lap and snarled if anyone ventured near. He claimed her lap to himself and guarded her as she crocheted her afghans.

Taco was also a family dog. The tapping of his paws traveled from room to room each night as he made the rounds, taking turns sleeping in different bedrooms. If someone was sick in bed with the flu, Taco kept vigil outside the bedroom door.

But Taco avoided Dad. Taco and Dad despised each other.

The reason was obvious. With all the mayhem in that house, nobody ever got around to potty training the poor pooch. He left his indelible mark on rugs, curtains, sofas, and stereo speakers. His call of nature became expensive, not to mention embarrassing, and nobody could blame Dad for being angry about having to replace the rugs and furniture because of Taco’s accidents. Dad eventually gave up and left the soiled furniture for company to see.