Riding Fury Home Read online

  Chapter 16. Riding Fury Home

  MOM RETURNED FROM the county hospital in the beginning of May, three weeks before my eleventh birthday. Aunt Rita called Mrs. Fredrickson to tell her they were on their way, and Mrs. Fredrickson said I could go wait at my house for them. I ran outside when I heard the rumble of gravel as my aunt, driving too fast, as usual, roared up to our front door. Mom got out of the passenger side. They’d put her back on pills before she left the hospital, but not as many, so she seemed less groggy when she leaned over to kiss me. “Hello, sweetheart,” she murmured. Aunt Rita lifted two bags of groceries from the back seat. She moved briskly into the house, and as soon as she had unloaded them into our fridge, she was gone.

  MRS. JANSEN CAME OVER that first afternoon. “Gloria, let me keep your pills for you,” she said.

  “Not necessary,” Mom said, waving her hand while holding her cigarette as if shooing a fly.

  Mrs. Jansen glanced over at me, then back at Mom. “Yes, I think so,” she said in a quiet, determined voice.

  Mom sighed and shrugged. “Oh, all right.”

  After that, every morning and evening, Mrs. Jansen walked through the fenceless side yard between our houses to bring Mom her pills.

  But whatever help the neighbors gave us, there was no controlling Mom’s driving phobia, which was erratic. You would never know when it would happen. We had a new car, a Rambler American convertible, that had replaced the old Hudson with its burned-out back seat from Mom’s cigarette butt. Dad had bought the Hudson from a coworker for $25, so it wasn’t such a big loss. The Rambler was white, with fire-engine-red seats, a red dashboard, and a black cloth roof. You could roll the roof back by just holding down a switch. Sometimes when we were about to go out, Mom would give me the keys and say, “Go put the top down while I get ready.” I would go turn the key in the ignition, then hold the switch down and listen to the whir of the motor that lifted the top and the crackle crackle of the cloth folding. Then I would climb into the back seat, pull the cover over the folded roof, and pop all the snaps down that hold it in place. I loved the feel of the leather seats, even if they were really just vinyl.

  I already sort of knew how to drive the Rambler, because once a week all through fifth grade, I loaded up our two silver garbage cans in the open trunk, drove the car from our front door to the end of our long driveway, and deposited the cans on the curb before backing up the driveway again. Mom said since we had no cops in Millstone, just a mayor, there was no one around to arrest a ten-year-old for taking out the garbage.

  There were no stores in our town except for Mr. Brezniak’s little grocery store, so if we needed anything, we had to get in the car. Mom and I would be driving down the road, going along just fine, when all of a sudden it would happen. I’d feel the car slow way down, then the next second I’d be jerked back as we’d zoom forward, then slow down again. Fast/slow, fast/slow, sending my head bobbing like one of those Chinese dolls. Mom’s face would be squeezed up tight, her arms stiff with her elbows out, her fingers gripping the wheel. Her right foot on the gas pedal was doing a dance of its own—down to the floor, up to the sky, down-up, down-up. How I hated that foot.

  If there was no traffic behind us, we could go down the road like that for a while—fast/slow, fast/slow—Mom silent, stiff and sweating, until she somehow got over it and went back to normal. I’d brace my arms against the dash to ease the jerking. Sometimes the person behind us would blow their horn and Mom would pull over. She’d take a Kleenex out of her purse and dab her sweaty face and neck. “Shit, shit, shit!” she’d mutter. I’d pat her shoulder, repeating, “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

  Mom said she was never like that before her electroshock treatments. I was too little when she left to remember if she was or she wasn’t. She said this fear would just come over her, making her freeze up. Bridges, cliff edges, any kind of heights meant an instant freeze. I could not see an easy way to melt her. And it seemed like it got worse over time.

  FOR MY ELEVENTH BIRTHDAY, Mom bought me the best present ever: tickets to a rodeo with a special appearance by Fury, the beautiful black stallion from the TV show that I adored. Fury was wild, and let no one ride him except the orphan boy, Joey.

  The rodeo was in Princeton, so of course we had to drive there. On the curvy, wooded road to Princeton, Mom’s driving fears attacked her, so we lurched down the road and arrived late. By the time we got there, the only seats left in the bleachers were at the very top. But when Mom tried to climb up those wooden bleachers, she froze again. “I can’t, honey!” she told me.

  “Come on, Mom!” I pulled on her arm. I just had to see Fury. “You’ve got to, Mom,” I demanded in a loud whisper, aware of people staring at us from their seats.

  “All right, darling, I’ll try.” Mom put her hands down onto the steps and climbed up the wooden bleacher stairs on all fours like a dog. I trailed as far behind as I could, trying to act like she wasn’t my mom.

  Once we got in our seats, she seemed okay. I forgot about her while I watched the men on horses roping cattle, riding in figure eights around oil barrels, being flung from bucking broncos. “Whooeee, yee-haw!” I screamed with the crowd. And then, I was silenced by the announcer’s solemn voice, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, we present to you the most famous horse on television for a one and only live performance . . . the black stallion known as Fury!”

  Of course, Fury had no rider because he was wild. Wild and beautiful and strong. I knew no one could tame him, and I loved that. He came out by himself, his muscles rippling, his coat so black and shiny. He ran in a circle around the arena, and then rose into the air, pawing and whinnying his stallion call of freedom, before he circled one more time and disappeared.

  I floated down the bleacher steps to the car, ignoring Mom and the nice man who helped her down the stairs by holding her arm. On the ride back along the dark wooded road, I was lost in a reverie of remembrance of the black stallion. Then—bam—my head jerked backward, jarring me out of dreaming. I awakened to the fast/slow, fast/slow lurching. I stared at the red dashboard. I could feel the hatred gather in my chest. Mom ruined everything. Ruined it.

  Chapter 17. Happy

  AFTER MOM CAME HOME, one of the first things I said to her was, “Let’s go get Happy.” She managed to drive us okay to the vet’s office. When he brought Happy out, I wrapped my arms around him, hugging him tight as his tail beat back and forth. “Let’s go home, boy,” I said.

  As much as I loved him, Happy had always been a difficult, restless hound. He loved to run loose, and after being cooped up so long at the vet’s, he was wild to go. He’d pace back and forth in front of the door and howl to be let out, fraying our nerves, until Mom or I would relent. Then he’d be off, running into the woods behind our house and out of sight. Neighbors reported sighting him several miles away, running through the fields of the dairy farms outside of town.

  One day in midsummer, Happy came limping home. I heard him at the back door, whimpering, and went to let him in. “Oh God, Mom,” I yelled over my shoulder, “Happy’s hurt bad!” His side was ripped open in a jagged line, with big gashes oozing blood and flesh, blood-caked fur, and a bit of intestines peeking out. I sat next to him in the back seat as we drove to the vet’s, holding his head in my lap as he moaned and shivered. I was shaking, too.

  After the vet sewed Happy up, Mom and I tried to keep him in, but as he healed, he started that irritating pacing again. One day, someone let him out—was it me or Mom?—and sure enough, Happy came back with his wound reopened. At the vet’s, the doctor said he needed to board Happy for a while until he healed better.

  A few days later, Mom said, “The veterinarian knows a farmer who is looking for a dog. Happy would have a big farm to live on, and could run all he wanted without getting in trouble. The vet thinks it’s best. What do you think?”

  I stared at her, chilled into silence. Then I managed to choke out, “I have to think about it.”

  I went upstairs to my ro
om, closed the door, and lay on my bed. Happy. My Happy. I loved him more than anything. He was my pal, my comfort. I didn’t want to lose him. But the vet had said that Happy’s side had been torn open when he’d leapt over a barbed wire fence. I could see that living with us, he kept getting hurt. A sob burst in me, and I lay there weeping.

  After I wiped my tears, I went downstairs and said to Mom, “Tell the vet to give Happy to the farmer. I want him to have a good life.”

  My mother made no offer to take me to the vet’s office to see Happy one last time to say goodbye, and I made no request to see him. Perhaps I understood it would hurt too much to feel him against me, so I just let him go.

  Chapter 18. Return

  THE MUGGY AUGUST NIGHT before my father was to return, I set my hair. Spiky pink rollers with plastic snap-on covers dug into my scalp as I tried to sleep. I had perfected the art of sleeping with an arm under my neck to relieve the pressure of the rollers, but then my arm would go numb and I’d have to give in to the curlers’ prickly pain. Spit curls were Scotch-taped against my cheeks—curls that made an almost full loop along the cheeks were the in style—posing a problem for me because I was allergic to Scotch tape. I had to stick on the tape as lightly as possible and then rip it off fast in the morning, hoping not to leave a blazing red tape mark. Sometimes I was lucky.

  Mom managed to drive us to the airport. In the international terminal, we waited across from the exit where passengers cleared customs. I was wearing my best dress, a full-skirted silk print with a tight bodice that revealed my new breasts, encased in a training bra. I had even wriggled into stockings held up with a garter belt. I peered toward the exit doors intently, so excited I was shivering, scrutinizing each man crossing the threshold. Someone who looked like Dad was approaching, but he was so short. “Is that him?” I asked Mom. “Is that him?”

  During the year my father had been gone, I had undergone a pubescent spurt; I had grown breasts and bled and lengthened to almost my full adult height of five foot one. Now my father was approaching and he seemed to have shrunk. Dad left as a towering giant and returned a little man.

  My father stopped in front of us and set down his two suitcases. “You’ve sure grown!” He sounded surprised, then reached to hug me.

  “Welcome home, Dad!” I threw my arms around his neck and kissed his cheek, scratchy with stubble. I disentangled myself and stepped back so Dad could get a better view. I was hoping he would notice more of the new me, but he turned to Mom. “Hi, Gloria.”

  “Abe,” she nodded. They hugged briefly. “The car’s in the garage. This way.”

  As we walked to the airport garage, Dad kept staring nervously at Mom. It seemed all his attention was on her. I sat alone in the back seat of the Rambler for the first time in a year as my father took the wheel and drove us home.

  For years later, remembering that day, my mother would fume, “He didn’t even say how nice you looked!” She was right: I had been disappointed and hurt. But it hadn’t taken me very long to understand that it was the tension—so thick between them, the bitterness and regret vibrating in the air—that riveted my father’s vision and blurred all sight of me.

  THE FIRST MORNING OF my father’s return, I awoke and sleepily went to my parents’ bedroom to say good morning. Mom had moved back upstairs to their bedroom with its twin beds. Their door was closed. I put my hand on the knob and swung the door inward. And then I froze, mouth agape. In the farthest twin bed from the door, up against the bedroom wall, my naked father was lying on top of my naked mother. They both turned their startled faces toward me. I was old enough to know what I had stumbled into and be horrified. No one made any sound in those frozen seconds. Mom’s eyes met mine—there was a look in her eyes of some unfathomable pain. That look lanced me beyond the simple shame of my bumbling intrusion. I backed out and pulled the door shut.

  Soon afterward we took a family vacation to Cape Cod. Grandma Katie came along. Dad drove all the way to the Cape, my tiny grandmother next to him in the front seat, her head barely rising above the seat back.

  Mom and I sat in back, giggling and playing car games, calling out the states of license plates and singsonging aloud the Burma Shave jingles as they came at us sign by wooden sign: BEN—MET ANNA—MADE A HIT—NEGLECTED BEARD—BEN-ANNA SPLIT—BURMA SHAVE.

  My parents rented a weather-beaten wooden bungalow a few blocks from the beach for the week. Each day my family packed a picnic lunch, beach towels, and blankets and headed for a day at the sea. To get to the shoreline, we first had to clamber through a gap in the sand dunes. This wasn’t a great swimming beach, because the water was frigid, so once we deposited the cooler and arranged the beach blanket, Mom and I went off to climb the huge Cape Cod dunes. We ran down in great leaps, over and over. There was a giddy, almost hysterical sense of abandon as we leapt and sank, leapt and sank, deep in sand. Far away down the beach, my father was a shadow, sitting on a blanket with Grandma.

  NOT LONG AFTER DAD returned, we started a new routine: Sunday dinners out at Bucky’s Chinese Restaurant. Bucky’s was on the far side of Manville, about fifteen minutes from our house. In the restaurant’s former incarnation, it had been Italian, and the new owners hadn’t bothered to replace the prior decor of ornate red and gold velvet wallpaper. On our first visit, Dad looked around the dark, almost windowless restaurant and declared, “This must have been a Mafia joint.”

  All the round fake-wood Formica tables had lazy Susans as centerpieces, which I thought was swell—no need to ask anyone to pass the food. The waiter brought us menus, but Mom didn’t even bother to open hers. She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke toward the ceiling, looking bored. Dad and I opened our menus and stared. I liked thinking about the different dishes, but the truth was we always ordered the same thing: Family Dinner for Three, which started with eggrolls with plum sauce, then wonton soup followed by “Two Choices from Column A/One from Column B.” In our case that meant shrimp with lobster sauce, moo goo gai pan, and green pepper beef.

  After we placed our order, the tense silence between my parents became even more prominent. It was like this at home, too, but seemed worse at the restaurant, when we were supposed to be having a fun time. I started frantically babbling, telling whatever story came to mind. “In class today, Mrs. Henderson told us about when she was a girl in Vermont, and how they bled the trees for maple syrup . . . ” until the egg rolls arrived and we had a diversion. I was proud that I could grab the egg rolls with my chopsticks. Dad had taught me to use them long ago, when he and I had lived alone together. He’d learned how when he went to Japan with the army at the end of World War II. Now, I tried to teach Mom: “Look, Mom it’s easy.” I raised my hand, holding the pair of chopsticks. “You just put one inside the crook by your thumb, the other leaning against your third finger.” I wiggled the wooden sticks to demonstrate. She shook her head, “I prefer a fork,” she said flatly.

  The waiter brought the soup. I watched as he ladled out the wontons, spinach, and broth into our bowls. As he spun our soup toward us, I was searching for another story, but my mind was blank.

  We started eating as I said, “Here’s one: Knock-knock!” This was a true act of desperation, because I considered knock-knock jokes for babies.

  Mom looked up. “Who’s there?”

  I smiled at her. “Orange!”

  Mom held her spoon in midair. “Orange who?”

  “Orange you glad you came a-knocking!” I gave her a big grin. Dad seemed completely oblivious, focused on his soup. Mom gave me a quick smile and lifted a wonton to her mouth.

  By the time the dishes were brought to the table in their silver-lidded platters with pedestals, I had run out of stories and jokes. I focused on the food on my plate. The only noise at the table was the quiet rumble of the lazy Susan as each of us spun it around to claim our shrimp with lobster sauce.

  Chapter 19. Perry Mason

  MY PARENTS’ WORDS were dense and hot. In my pajamas, I was crouched in my eavesdropping spo
t in the upstairs balcony that overlooked the living room. Mom and Dad thought I was asleep as they argued, their voices rising. Some part of me wanted out of there, bad, but it was too late to move.

  Then Mom said a word that hit me in the throat and I stood and cried out, “No!” Both Mom and Dad looked up at me, their mouths open. My bare feet were pounding down the wood stairs, along the concrete floor in the hall, into the living room where Mom and Dad were sitting on opposite ends of the couch.

  “No, you can’t!” I yelled. “You have to try! Please, please don’t get a divorce!”

  Back in my bed, I shivered. In spite of the silences between my parents, the stabbing looks, I had told myself a story of my family to hold on to—a story of love. It went: No matter how bad things are, we all love each other. We’re together even when we’re apart. We’ll always be together. There was a desperate fluttering in my chest. Dad had been back from England just over a year, and it was all falling apart.

  MY PARENTS DID TRY, for another month or so. During that month of November 1963, John F. Kennedy was shot dead. Grief struck us all. We spent a muted, somber Thanksgiving at Aunt Rita’s. One night at bedtime, a couple of weeks after the assassination, my father came into my room to tell me he would be moving out the next day. Dad stood next to my bed and held my hand while I cried. He tried to comfort me: “I promise we’ll spend time on the weekends together.” He looked unbearably sad. I felt so bad for Dad. I choked off my tears and smiled feebly at him.