Planting Dandelions (16 page)

The girls had nothing to wear but the clothes they had on their backs the day they arrived. They had no Corvette, no camper, no pony, no dream house. I thought a man around the place would brighten things up. They could at least go dancing and have threesomes.

Barbie deprivation doesn't exactly count as trauma, but that didn't keep me from holding it over my mother's head for years, using it as an excuse for all kinds of girly excesses, including frosted highlights, tanning beds, and vapid boyfriends. To the conscientious few who still wring their hands over Barbie's place in their daughter's toy box and developing body image, I say give in to it. Barbie is the modern-day Venus of Willendorf: stylized, exaggerated, and unable to stand. She represents an aspect of femininity that must be held for a time, literally and symbolically. So she has freakish proportions and no nipples. You think paleolithic moms worried that their little girls would grow up feeling something was wrong with them because they had distinct facial features and the Venus of Willendorf didn't? You bet they did. But Santa came through anyway.

Which is more than I can say he did for me on December 25, 1978, when I awoke to find “Chuck and His 4 Outfits” waiting for me under the tree.

Chuck was a squat and swarthy fellow made of thin hollow plastic, not the beefy solid vinyl of a real Mattel man. His four outfits did not make him a fashion doll. His clothes were the uniforms of manual labor: among them, a red-and-black-checked flannel jacket and a blue work shirt that could transition easily between the bowling lane and the prison machine shop. He didn't come in a proper box with a window, just a cellophane bag that was made to hang off a metal rod in the dollar section of the store, with all the other cheap no-name dolls, whose unbendable limbs never stayed in their sockets. He did not have an Olympic medal, or a bitchin' sailboard, or even a pair of sunglasses and swim trunks. Chuck was the kind of guy who'd wear cutoffs to the pool. I'm surprised he didn't come with a six-pack of beer.

I loved my girls too much to let Chuck anywhere near them. I don't know what happened to him. Probably he shacked up under the bed with the Bionic Woman. Superstar and Ballerina gradually became more eccentric and unstable, rather like the Edies of Grey Gardens. They lay around disheveled and half naked most of day, destroyed by the unfulfilled promise of their beauty. Their prince had never come.

As for me, I found a life-size Ken doll to date in my teens, and found revenge in my father's expression every time he saw us together.

“Your mother is very upset about this,” he said gruffly, when word reached him that I was seeing “Ken,” a twenty-five-year-old part-time model and ski bum who was nearly ten years older than I. Whenever a conversation with one of his daughters stirred up uncomfortable feelings, my father would stiffen and summon “your mother” to speak through him, like he was channeling Ramtha, the 35,000-year-old man. I tried to look concerned. I doubted my mother had caught wind of it, having moved away to study law, taking my preteen sister to live with her. I had insisted with typical, pain-in-the-ass, teenage defiance that I wasn't going anywhere and was, to my astonishment, allowed to stay. I was boarded with a family who my mother mistakenly hoped would act as surrogates, and our house was rented out, since Dad was supposed to go abroad on sabbatical. He drifted instead between friends, relatives, and hotel bars, from which he presided over the occasional father-daughter conference. I came and went from my landlady's house as I pleased, hanging out in bars, skipping class, and sleeping at my boyfriend's place. I was not quite seventeen, but as far as I could see, I was on my own. It was a little late, I thought, sitting across a table from my father in the plush mauve lounge of the Holiday Inn, to be laying down the law.

It's one thing to not get what you want from your parents. That's the grist of anecdote and of character. To not get what you need, that's another matter, less readily transformed from its raw state. Through the mirrored lens of teenage cool, I could see my father was drowning, unable to save himself, let alone take care of anyone else. I could see that pursuing her career was probably my mother's best, last chance at pulling away from the whirlpool that had begun to swirl around him; that there was no time to lose by fighting me or waiting a few more years. In my mind, I saw all that, and I understood. But in my heart, my parents had left me. And there was no magical misfit to pin it on, or turn it into a funny story.

“Is that your dad?” a playmate asked me once, regarding a huge painted portrait of my father that hung above our living room sofa, a flurry of thick black brushstrokes for his long hair and wild beard, his fierce brow.

“Yes,” I replied. Her eyes widened.

“Aren't you scared of him?”

Sometimes, yes.

“Of course not,” I said.

His poems were in our readers at school, his books, in the library. Teachers and classmates were always asking me, What's it like having a poet for a father?

I never knew how to answer that question. How should I know what it's like? What's it like having your father for a father?

It was wonderful. It was terrible. It was all I ever knew.

He wasn't like other fathers, and ours was not like other families, at least not in my small hometown in the seventies, when the paper mill was still thriving and the little college where he taught English was brand-new.

“Mrs. Collins,” I marveled to my third-grade teacher one morning, “when I woke up, there were eighteen people asleep on our living room floor.”

My parents had hosted a party the night before, and our living room had been turned into a temporary hostel. At dawn, I tiptoed over the blanketed bodies in my flannel nightgown, counting the fallen like Florence Nightingale on the fields of Crimea.

There may have been eight. It may as well have been eighty, to judge from the elevation of my teacher's eyebrows.

In elementary school, most kids reacted to these glimpses of bohemian home life with curiosity, but in junior high, they branded me a freak. Hardly any of my classmates would have anything to do with me by then. My parents couldn't appreciate how desperate I was to fit in, and my yearning to be ordinary baffled them. They had raised an intelligent, worldly child. I could make a French omelet and recite Shakespeare. I read
Ms.
magazine and
Our Bodies, Ourselves.
I was hip to marketing propaganda. I could understand the concept of peer pressure. So why did I suddenly want to let Jordache advertise on my backside for free? People weren't meant to be used as billboards, they said. You're smarter than that. You're special.

But I didn't want to be smart or special anymore. I wanted to be normal.

I tried to pass with a disguise. Parents, teach your children proper makeup application at home, or they will learn it on the street. My tutor was a petite, busty eighth-grader named Nicki, who was rumored to have Done It, and was a self-proclaimed expert in cosmetology. I was well beneath her social standing, though a grade older, but she couldn't resist such an acute makeover challenge. She came home with me after school one day, her book bag stuffed with beauty products and tools, and went to work. She covered my pimply face with bottled foundation from the drugstore, a noxious-smelling pink suspension of chalk and oil. Over this base, powder blush was applied in dark welts. “Contouring,” Nicki explained, making me suck in my cheeks as she colored them the brownish-purple of an old bruise. Thick kohl liner and frosted shadow was applied to my eyes, and my glasses were set aside, though I could barely see without them. My hair was gelled, feathered, curled, and varnished stiff.

I squinted into the mirror, and saw a miracle.

I bounded down the stairs to show my mother. “What do you think?” I asked, eagerly.

My flawlessly complexioned mother, whose own cosmetic bag held a tiny vial of rouge and one pan of blue-green eye shadow from 1966, reacted with equal parts horror and amusement.

“I think you look ridiculous,” she blurted.

“You don't know anything!” I shouted, running back up the stairs. Her insistence that I was fine the way I was proved just how little she knew. I was teased for the clothes she liked on me, the embroidered peasant dresses and bib overalls. My classmates sniggered at my unusual name. I wasn't special. I was strange. And I was anything but fine the way I was.

Nicki was still sitting on my bed, peering into a compact. She wore tight blue jeans and an off-shoulder angora sweater. It was said she owned over a dozen of them, and had dated an eighteen-year-old. She glanced up at me through lush curled lashes, surveying her own artisanship with cool satisfaction, then raised one perfectly tweezed eyebrow.

“Never mind,” I said, apologetically, tipping my head backward in the direction of the stairs. “I love your sweaters. Where do you buy them?”

Then I shut the door behind me and pushed off, chasing normal.

It's unsettling to me, now, to realize what a dark view I took of being misunderstood by my parents, and how silently I nursed those resentments, both petty and grievous. I'm sure I've already disappointed my own kids more than I know, and they haven't got to middle school yet. We're not even at the
hard
part. The questions I put to my mother about past maternal misdeeds aren't intended to make her feel bad, but to make me feel better. If I can let her off the hook, maybe there's clemency down the road for me.

When the boys were babies, and crying was their only vocabulary for complaints, I longed for them to learn to talk, to tell me exactly what was wrong. But as their language has grown more complex, so have their needs and desires. The list of solutions used to be a short one: there were few problems a snuggle, a snack, or a change of clothes couldn't solve. Once, I had the power to stop bad dreams just by laying my hand on the back of a troubled sleeper. Now the older two can read newspaper headlines about suicide bombers, car crashes, and cancer, nightmares I can't banish, monsters I can't promise aren't real. Longer stretches of their days are spent away from me, of which I only hear selected highlights. They have interactions with friends, teachers, neighbors, and strangers that don't involve me. Just because children can use their words doesn't mean they will. When I consider what proportion of my own childhood lay hidden beneath the surface of my days, the transparency of an earsplitting wail is a relief in a way. At least it's quite obvious that something is the matter.

My middle son, in particular, keeps his cards close to his chest. Quiet and enigmatic by nature, I call him our stealth child. He is extremely sensitive to all input, sensory or otherwise. Sounds are louder, tastes are stronger, smells are smellier, feelings are, well, feelier. Turning inward is his way of taking care of himself in a world that is sometimes too much with him. Prying gets me nowhere, but there's a sweet spot, somewhere between backing off and standing by, where he comes out into the open. Sometimes I meet him there.

A month after starting second grade, he burst through the front door, crying. He and his big brother were tearing across the yard, when he tripped over a tree root and fell, most uncomically, on his funny bone. I ran his arm through a series of highly scientific wiggle tests, and applied an ice pack, but when he was still crying after twenty minutes, and unmoved by his big brother's entreaties every five minutes to “come see this!” I decided a trip to the emergency room was in order. It wasn't like him to stay down for so long. Maybe he had a hairline fracture.

Sitting in the hospital examination room, waiting for an X-ray order, afforded us some rare one-on-one time. I struggled to keep something like a conversation going, never a problem with his chatterbox brothers. I asked him about his arm, and where he was running in such a hurry, and how school was going. We had been in our new neighborhood all summer, long enough for him to make friends with kids in his grade, but I knew it was taking him a little while to find his place.