It was during my brief incarceration in the Saint Jude’s rehab unit that my father let his bombshell drop, about the woman he’d had on the side for years and about how the time had finally come to cut my mother loose. She said, “That was always his plan, wasn’t it? To stick the rest of us out there on the gulag so he would be free to conduct himself like a tomcat?”
The gulag she was talking about was the place my parents bought when Louisa and I were kids: crooked farmhouse on ten acres forty miles from town, half pastureland and half swampy alder forest, sandwiched between a U-cut Christmas tree lot and a junkyard. “And didn’t I walk straight into his trap, letting myself be kept barefoot and pregnant out there in the wilderness?”—this said to me against the background plink-plink of the Saint Jude’s Ping-Pong table. I figured there was no use in pointing out to Mum that she had not been pregnant since Spiro Agnew was vice president.
My explanation had always been that my father put those miles between us and the pulp mill where he was an engineer because every day then gave him the chance to display his knack for expediting anything that could stand to move a little faster. Forty miles to work, no problem — the distance he compensated for by driving ninety, roaring down the dirt roads in his Lincoln. When he learned there was no municipal garbage collection out there in the sticks, my father’s solution was to buy an old backhoe from the junkyard, a yellow hulk spotted with brown primer that reminded Louisa and me of a giraffe. Cheaper than paying for a private service, he said. Of course, the trash piled up, waiting for him to get around to burying it.
Louisa stumped him, though, because for her he could come up with no quick fix. I’ve seen him walk into what he thought was an empty room, only to find the two of us quietly playing there, making our naked Barbies do the splits. And Louisa he’d stare at without the least quiver of recognition, like she was some wild child who’d just stumbled in from the forest. Then he’d ask me a question to dislodge the particles in the room that had congealed around my sister, something like, “Did you remember to brush out Mister Chester?”
Mister Chester was my father’s horse, though he might as well have been a motorcycle or a magic carpet, since my father’s main interest lay in the speed with which he could be conveyed. But Mister Chester was, at the end of the day, a horse, and that meant someone had to muck his stall and lance his boils and sop his pus, which was where I came in, the pus-sopper, boil-lancer, little miss mucker of the stall. This was why, though I am nowhere near the rider that my father is, Mister Chester had no choice but to tolerate me on his back. The horse was smart enough to realize that if he threw me and broke my neck, in no time he’d be living belly-deep in his own shit.
Shortly after the arrival of Mister Chester, Mum shamed my father into also buying a more docile creature for my sister, a pony the color of curdled milk, whom she named Mister Twinkie. I own only one photograph of her from the family’s brief Mister Twinkie era: ten years old and cowgirl-hatted, her fists full of the pony’s cotton-boll mane. She looks like she’s found the place she was born to be, her and the pony giving off an aura of yellow light. You would not guess from this picture that Mister Twinkie would turn out to be just bad luck with four legs attached: mention his name now and all that light will drain from Louisa in the form of yolky tears.
What happened was that not too long into his time with us, the pony had a heart attack as it trotted along under Louisa’s weight, and Louisa sank to the ground with three hundred and fifty pounds of dog food underneath her. Picture me as the littler sister watching from the far side of the field as the bigger sister squats bowlegged with the carcass in between her fancy boots. Even from a distance I knew that Mister Twinkie was dead and I knew that she did not, and I knew that my knowing forever changed the space between us. “Get up!” she hollered, and even tried to drag the pony a few feet, until I came across the pasture and explained that Mister Twinkie could not get up, he never would.
After this, it seemed my mother soured on the whole idea of country living. But at least the demise of Mister Twinkie gave the backhoe a chance to prove its worth. And while he was at it, my father dumped several weeks’ garbage into the hole before he scooped the dirt back in.
MAYBE YOU ALREADY KNOW that “desperate situations” are what Saint Jude is supposed to be the patron of, unlike other saints who could at least pull enough rank to get themselves saddled with a legitimate disease. Not Judas Iscariot with whom he is often confused, but Thaddaeus the apostle, brother of James. And what with his being decapitated by the Persians you might also imagine that he is not going to let anyone easily off the hook: after you get released from inpatient treatment, you’re still looking at outpatient therapy for at least six weeks. Which means sitting around for three hours every morning with the other narcos, drinking coffee that tastes like it’s been perked inside the hospital’s incinerator with all the other medical waste.
How outpatient at Saint Jude’s worked was that we went around the room delivering our bulletins from Loserville, the plots of which were all fundamentally the same: I can’t even make cookies without the whole thing turning into this great big goddamn fucking flop, so how the hell can anyone expect me to dot dot dot, you can fill in the back end of the sentence with the hobbyhorse of your own ineptitude. The professional staff called it “sharing,” one of the bad words in my book, but if you start quibbling about the nomenclature you can forget about them ever signing off on your paperwork.
Roger the therapist wears Birkenstock sandals that he slips off his feet to sit cross-legged in his chair, from which he reports in what is supposed to be a soothing yet forceful voice that we are good people and next time we will be able to make the cookies. Then he stands with his arms outstretched to give the author of this particular sob story a hug, only the majority of us are not huggers: instead we stare back at him through the steam rising from our coffee cups until Roger puts his arms down like a corkscrew folding up.
“Okay, you’re not ready, I respect that,” he says, and then it’s on to the next person: I can’t even microwave a bowl of soup without the whole thing turning into a great big goddamn fucking and on and on until you start feeling like you’re stuck in one of those sci-fi time loops, and the three hours goes by like three thousand years.
You can see why it would have made me feel full of myself, to know that I could go home and spend my afternoons with Mister Chester, while the other narcos would be pulling second shift at the Tool-and-Die and biting their nails down to the quick. A little animal-human interaction, a few weeks of my mother’s cream cheese and chutney sandwiches, and I figured I’d be back to my old life selling boats. I had the personal affirmations that Roger made each of us write for ourselves hanging in the kitchen—LIFE DOES NOT REQUIRE YOUR PARTICIPATION and BEING A CURMUDGEON IS NO SIN—those were the only two I’d been able to come up with that didn’t strike me as the verbal equivalent of a yellow smiley face.
“What’s a cur-mud-gee-on?” Louisa asked, squinting at the refrigerator door. I told her it meant a person who didn’t want to be nice all the time.
“Everyone wants to be nice.”
“I don’t.”
Louisa shrugged: “Maybe you’d be happy if you were nice.”
“Who says I want to be happy?”—but of course my sister says I should be happy because I’m living back home with her and Mum, all of us gals together again at last.