Читать книгу Inside Out - Demi Moore - Страница 10

It was the early seventies, and my mom did what people were starting to do: she went to a therapist. She was going to get help and get better. She was going to find herself! There was the ambient energy of the women’s movement floating around the culture at that time, and we had a feminist neighbor my mother became friendly with who probably introduced Ginny to some of the ideas and catchphrases of women’s liberation. But in her fragile state my mom was impressionable: after she saw The Exorcist, she went through a Charismatic Christianity phase. She would take me to services at a Catholic church where they played George Harrison songs and danced around in dashikis.

She was trying to figure out who she was. Sometimes I would “overhear” her talking with our neighbor at the kitchen table about how she was struggling. (I was such a snoop, my parents would joke that I “didn’t want to miss a fart.” But looking back, I see that what I was doing was patrolling for chaos. My mother had just tried to kill herself: I had to stay on high alert.) She would complain about the ways my dad didn’t appreciate her and the deprivations of her childhood. They had been so poor that one Christmas she got her own doll wrapped up as a present, just wearing new clothes. To her, that doll symbolized the scarcity of her upbringing—the lack of money, nurturing, and attention she grew up craving. I heard that story many times.

I could feel the dynamics shift just a little in our house: for years, my mom had put up with my dad’s cheating and had been completely dependent on him financially and emotionally. It’s sad to say, but when she tried to kill herself, it had the effect of reclaiming a little power: she had shown my dad she might be capable of leaving him. Unfortunately, she had shown her children she was capable of leaving us, too.

My mother was repeating her own family history. Her first experience of male love was from the same kind of flirtatious, charismatic troublemaker as my dad. My maternal grandfather, Bill King, didn’t think much of my dad when my mother first started going out with him in high school, but the two men had a lot in common. Granddaddy was a charming womanizer and rule bender who played stand-up bass in a country band. He was very tough: one time when he had a toothache and they didn’t have the money for a dentist, he went up to the bathroom with a razor blade and cut the tooth out himself. Eventually, Granddaddy had a wild death to match his wild life: he was out drinking one night when he drove his beloved blue El Camino into—and under—a moving truck. He was decapitated.

I was ten when he died. I remember him as a silver fox, handsome and rugged, his strong hands stained by motor oil. He owned a little gas station where my cousins and I loved to play, but when my mom was young, he was out of work for a long time after he broke his back on the job, working construction with a road crew. My grandmother had to support them and the three daughters they had at the time—my mom and her older sisters, Billie and Carolyn. This was distinctly not the life my grandma Marie had hoped for. She had her heart set on going to college. Growing up on the border of Texas and New Mexico in a strict Pentecostal home, she was the first member of her family to graduate high school. But Marie ended up a young wife and mother working full time to make ends meet. She was stretched thin.

My mother’s interpretation of my grandma’s unavailability was that she, Ginny, was unlovable. She was a skinny, sickly child, and she never got over feeling neglected—never enough money, never enough love, an afterthought. It never occurred to her that my grandmother simply didn’t have the bandwidth to nurture her the way she might have wanted. Ginny wasn’t able to put herself in my grandmother’s shoes and imagine what it was like for her as a young woman, living with a cheating husband for whom she’d given up her dreams, having to support a family without the benefit of training or education—and taking care of three little kids on top of that.

My grandma Marie was by far the most dependable grown-up in my life. She was raised on a broomcorn farm in Elida, New Mexico, in the 1930s, and possessed a practical farmer’s do-what-needs-to-be-done competence. She was solid, consistent, and trustworthy. But for all her good qualities, she had taught my mother—who in turn taught me—some strange coping mechanisms. Whenever Granddaddy was unfaithful, he would convince Grandma Marie that it was the women who were the problem. He persuaded her after one affair that they had to move to get away from his pursuer, so they picked up and left for Richmond, California, where my mother was born. When Ginny was about twelve, after they’d moved back to Roswell, she came home early from school one day and walked in on her father in bed with his brother’s wife. His reaction was to scream at my mom—blame his daughter for the situation. He had been my mother’s safe harbor; she worshipped him. Their relationship was never the same after that.

ONE HOT SUMMER afternoon in Canonsburg, Ginny told me giddily that I should hurry and get packed; we were going to a hotel. It didn’t make any sense, but I got caught up in my mother’s enthusiasm as she hustled Morgan and me into her Pinto and took us to a nearby hotel with lots of blond wood, where everything was brightly lit and sparkling clean. My excitement fizzled into confusion and anxiety when she told us that we would be staying there because she was leaving Dad for her shrink, Roger. They were in love, she explained; Roger was paying for the room, and we would be moving with him to California, where he was going to build a glass house for us to live in. She even showed us the plans.

It was a solid sales pitch. She presented her new plan as perfectly reasonable and already settled, with no acknowledgment that her kids might experience some pain or fear or confusion about their parents splitting up. Partly, this was because she was too caught up in her fantasy to consider our feelings, but I also wonder if, at some level, she knew this was nowhere near the end of her relationship with my dad.

Roger was a tall, sandy-haired guy with blue eyes and wire-rimmed glasses who had grown up in Northern California. Clearly, he was not a therapist who subscribed to a professional code of ethics. It’s heartbreaking when you consider that my mother went to him trying to find help: she saw him as the answer to all her problems, a sober, educated man who could put her on a different path. Instead, she found one more guy to complicate her life. He prescribed her uppers and downers, and I doubt she was following the recommended dosage. The pills, along with the alcohol she drank to wash them down, made her more unpredictable than ever.

My parents started going through the motions of splitting up. My mother moved in with Roger, and we alternated between staying with her at the hotel and with my dad at the apartment. A few weeks later, he told us we were going on a road trip. Off we went to Ohio, to visit my aunt and uncle in Toledo. Only he didn’t tell my mom. From her perspective, we had all just vanished. (I can only imagine the powerlessness and raw panic she must have felt.) Dad told our relatives that she had abandoned us for Roger without a word, that he had no idea how to reach her, and they believed him. Morgan and I were so accustomed to things not adding up that I don’t know if we even bothered to question the situation, or wonder why Ginny wasn’t calling and checking in on us. In any case, we were distracted: my aunt and uncle took us with their kids on a road trip to the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. For me the main attraction was Minnie Pearl, who had, always, a price tag dangling from her hat.

None of this would fly now, of course, in the age of cell phones, Instagram, email, and FaceTime, but it was easy to disappear in the seventies. My dad had made it something of a specialty. When we were in one place long enough for bills to start showing up at the door, he would write “deceased” next to his name on the envelope and take it back to the post office. I remember a microwave he bought from Sears—when microwaves seemed like a miraculous invention—that he made Morgan sign for when the deliveryman brought it to our house. My dad then told Sears he wouldn’t pay for it because a child’s signature wasn’t legally binding. He stiffed stores for all kinds of things with schemes like that; he was a creative guy. If either one of my parents had ever applied their intelligence to something constructive, I honestly believe they could have been highly successful. They had the brains, they just didn’t have the tools to pursue a positive path. And so much of their energy was focused on self-sabotage, or on sabotaging each other—I think we treat the people we love the way we believe, in our deepest hearts, that we deserve to be treated ourselves.

That summer in Toledo, my dad had no idea how to be alone with us. I had always felt connected to him, but he was so withdrawn by this point that it was impossible to feel close. He loved us, sure. But he hadn’t kidnapped us because he was determined to spend quality time with his children or because he was genuinely afraid Ginny would take us to California and he’d never see us again. I think our time in Ohio was just one extended power play in my parents’ never-ending love-hate struggle—and I suppose he won that particular round. Because somehow, by the end of the summer, he’d convinced my mom to forgive him for kidnapping her children, and we headed back to Pennsylvania so they could give it another shot.

Everything was going to be different. We were—of course—going to move, to a bigger house in another town in Pennsylvania called Charleroi, thirty miles outside of Pittsburgh. It was a step up on every level. A spacious, modern house painted avocado green, with high ceilings and shiny new appliances that my mother loved. The plumbing needed work, but Dad was good at that: he blew cigarette smoke through the pipes and had Morgan sit up in the bathroom and yell down to tell him which was the hot tap and which was the cold based on where the smoke came out.

Of all the places we lived, I think that house most closely matched my mom’s fantasy of what life should look like. Unlike her mother, Ginny’s aspirations early on were conventional: she wanted to be a beautiful wife and mother who was adored by her husband and had a nice home. And she had made nice homes for us, everywhere we went. She had a knack for decorating; she managed to whip each house we lived in into shape almost as soon as we got there: sewing curtains, arranging the furniture and knickknacks she got from a company called Home Interiors, and generally making things look lived in, as if we’d been there for years. But at the Green House, as my brother and I called it, she outdid herself. That house was the embodiment of her domestic ambitions. I was even allowed to get a puppy. Unfortunately, it went to the bathroom in front of my dad’s closet and he gave me a “spanking” for that with his belt. (I didn’t cry, though. I never, ever cried, no matter what.) The puppy went back.

Of course, nothing was really different in Charleroi. The same stuff was just happening in a different house. Danny was gambling and drinking to excess. He was an excellent pool player, and, when he was lucky, he would convince some unsuspecting fool to bet against him, saying that he could win with one eye covered. Then Danny would cover up the lazy eye he could barely see out of anyway, and proceed to rake in the other guy’s money.

It didn’t always go his way. He lost huge amounts of money playing poker and would come home raging, drunk, and broke. At one point my father turned to a mafia loan shark to cover his gambling losses, and he was indebted to the mob for years afterward. He had already been working with them to sway local elections for mafia-favored candidates and other low-level, unsavory stuff like that. However indirect my dad’s involvement, it was still dangerous. He got into a shoot-out outside of a bar in Charleroi once. Another time, my mom went with a female friend to a pub in town and was spotted by a mobster who called my dad: he told my dad that mob women weren’t supposed to be out unaccompanied like that; it didn’t look right.

I, meanwhile, started seventh grade, which in Charleroi was part of the giant, terrifying high school. As always, I was the new girl. It’s possible that all the adapting I had to do primed me to become an actress: it was my job to portray whatever character I thought would be most popular in every new school, in every new town. I identified the in crowd and studied them for clues: Did the cool girls wear bell-bottoms or hot pants? What were their accents like? What did I need to do to be accepted? Was it best to try to stand out or blend in? It would be decades before it occurred to me that I could just be whoever I truly am, not the person I guessed other people wanted to see.

Needless to say, whenever I started to get a sense of a place, to decipher how I might fit in through sports or the social scene or what classes I might be good at, it was time to pick up and leave. Usually without much warning, or any kind of logical plan.

I DON’T KNOW which of my dad’s illicit activities provoked this particular fight—whether it was another infidelity, or if he just got too nasty when he was drunk—but one afternoon when I was doing my homework to the background music of my parents fighting at the top of their lungs, I heard my mother scream, “I’ve had it with your shit!” She came storming into my room and told Morgan and me to grab our stuff and get in the car, we were going back to Roswell.

This was nothing out of the ordinary, of course: we were pretty efficient at packing by this point, and we were used to hitting the road for hours on end while my mother chain-smoked out the window. But going back to Roswell was a departure from the exhausting routine of starting over from scratch. Insofar as we understood the concept, Roswell was home. It was where we came from, where we had family and history and an understanding of the culture and the community. And then there was Grandma Marie, whom I’d called “Mother” as a little girl, and who was, in many ways, the only adult I really trusted. Staying with her was grounding, soothing. When we got to her house, it was a relief just to be in her midst.

Even with half a dozen states between them, my parents managed to keep their drama explosive. The screaming phone calls began almost as soon as we arrived—my father’s voice was so loud through the receiver it felt like he was there in the room. My mother would stalk around the house sobbing histrionically, while I tried to stay out of her way. Morgan escaped into his projects: taking apart and putting back together the vacuum cleaner motor, disassembling the alarm clock to see how it worked. When my aunts came around, I realized they were shooting knowing glances at each other during my mother’s outbursts and drinking binges. For the first time I felt embarrassed by her. And I was ashamed of myself for feeling that way.

Ginny wanted me to take her side and tell everyone how horrible my dad had been to her, but I couldn’t. Aside from the gambling, I felt they were equally to blame for the chaos in our lives. Now that I was old enough, I could see how childish she was compared to her sisters—how rarely she took responsibility for herself, and how her default mode was to blame everyone else: my dad, my grandmother, whoever. Little by little, I started to wall myself off from her. With my grandmother around, I didn’t need to overlook my mother’s craziness just to survive.

So, on the inevitable afternoon when Ginny said we were going back to my dad, I didn’t get up and start packing as I always had in the past. Dad had gotten a new job in Washington State, north of Seattle, Ginny told me and my grandmother, and the plan was to return to him in Pennsylvania and then move to the other side of the country together as a family.

I looked at my grandmother. I looked at my mom. And then I said, “I’m not going.” Ginny didn’t give me a good enough reason for returning to the man she’d been spending all of her waking hours maligning to her family or fighting with on the phone. I was sick of things not adding up. Whatever it was they were doing, I didn’t want to be a part of it. My mother tried to persuade me, but she saw that I was immovable. She took Morgan and went back to Charleroi without me.

That summer, I did gymnastics at the Y, where I made my first best friend, Stacy Welch. My grandmother enrolled me in the better public school in Roswell in the fall—we weren’t zoned for it, but Grandma Marie finagled it by dropping me off every morning at Stacy’s house, and then Stacy and I would walk to the bus or Mrs. Welch would drive us to school. I made the cheerleading squad. Suddenly, I was living like a normal person, like everybody else. It felt great.

Once Ginny made it to Washington with my brother, I started getting the push: “You should come up here; it’s beautiful, you’d love it!” And there was a part of me that felt you should be with your parents—a dutiful pull. But why? I was doing fine.

My grandmother took care of me with a consistency I’d never before experienced. She made sure that I finished my homework, brushed my teeth, got to bed on time. She let me paint my room bright yellow because I loved Tweety Bird so much. She was attentive to everything in my life, including the friends I was making at school. If I went to the movies, she would pick me up, or, if she was working, she’d arrange to have someone else get me. Never once was I left standing on a street corner, wondering if anyone would show up. The daily disasters of life with my parents were nonexistent. In essence, I got the version of my grandmother that my mother had always yearned for.

After my granddaddy died, my grandmother went through a prolonged mourning period. For almost two years, every day when she got home from her job in the office of a legal title company, she lay on the couch in the living room without turning on the lights. Then she met a lovely guy named Harold and found love again. They had their regular schedule, and I became part of their routines: Tuesday and Saturday nights they went dancing, so I either had a sleepover at a friend’s house or someone came and slept over with me. Wednesday was Grandma Marie’s standing appointment at the beauty parlor, and when she finished getting her hair done after work, we would go out to dinner, just the two of us, at one of the usual spots: the Mexican restaurant, Furr’s cafeteria, or the Chinese place. The Roswell rotation.

It was a halcyon period of safety, a time when I saw what a parent could be—should be—and an example I would look to when I became a mother. And yet, I started to get restless. By that point, I was conditioned to not stay in one place for too long. I didn’t have any experience in following through; I had no barometer for the hardships—or the rewards—of commitment. I’ve often wondered what my life would be like if I’d remained in Roswell. I would have had to work on developing and maintaining friendships, which had always been disposable. I would have had to set goals for myself, which I’d never done, because we weren’t in one place long enough to see them through.

None of that happened. I had learned to crave extremes: it was like I needed the juice of it. I lasted six months in Roswell. Then I went back to my parents.