Chapter 1. The Bad Seed

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Leo Tolstoy

In 1962, my sister Rory was born when I was eight years old, and single-handedly ruined my life. My family morphed into The Three Bears: Rory was the troublesome Baby Bear, Mom was the distraught Mama Bear, and I was the indignant Papa Bear. Dad was Goldilocks, who occasionally darted in to eat all the porridge and break the furniture.

Mom always said she had Rory to keep me company, but like many sacrifices my mother said she made for me, they were really done for her own benefit. Dad was fucking around, she had me -- et voila! -- he was back in the fold. It worked once, why not twice! But Rory was not the angel baby I was. It seems I inherited the best of my parents’ so-called qualities, and Rory inherited the worst.

This is the way I became aware of all the crises in my life: I’m walking down the street, la la la. After a while, it dawns on me that something is not right. It feels like I’m trudging underwater in one of those deep sea diving suits. I look down and see that I have walked about three yards into a newly cemented portion of the sidewalk. What an idiot! I’m up to my ankles in wet cement and have just ruined a brand new pair of boots. This, unfortunately, is not a dream.

For example, one day I realized that Mom was spending all her time on the couch. She didn’t watch TV or read or listen to music. She just stared off into space, absentmindedly picking threads out of her once-white terry cloth robe which was now stained and dingy. Her toenails were long and the polish was chipped. Her magnificent Titian hair hung dull and limp and frizzy. I knew that something was really, really wrong since Mom would rather die than be seen with frizzy hair, but all she seemed to be suffering from was lethargy, or as Dad said, a case of the “Sleeping Uglies.”

Mom’s behavior was also unnerving because normally she loved nothing better than to immerse herself in the improvement of others, especially Dad. Before she landed on the couch, she’d pepper Dad with surefire schemes intended to catapult him to the Valhala of academia, tenure. And like a sorely tried sheepdog, she ceaselessly mounted campaigns to bring Dad back into the good graces of department heads Dad alienated with the élan of someone who had no need to make a living. (If they’d had “shock jocks” then, he’d have made them all look like mealy-mouthed Pollyannas.) Mom also created huge cathedral-like hushes for the completion of Dad’s grant applications since he always waited until the night before they were due to knuckle down. She labored for years over the coup de gras, a needlepoint pillow that said, “Publish or Perish!”

The only advantage I gained from Rory’s birth was that Mom finally gave up trying to “JonBenet” me (even though I, at a surprisingly young age, loathed ringlets and tap dancing and cute little outfits), since Mom’s biggest push was to make the mildly retarded Rory “normal.” But Rory was completely impervious to Mom’s fixer-upper attempts, making me wonder just how retarded Rory really was.

At first, like Pinochio on Pleasure Island, Dad, Rory and I (the newly configured Three Bears who’d finally ousted Goldilocks) reveled in our freedom with no thought for the future. Dad grew his hair long and started hanging out at a nearby commune. I wore frayed jeans with patches that said, “Make Love, Not War,” and didn’t come home at night until long after everyone was asleep. Rory took advantage of my absences to ransack my room, the forbidden sanctum sanctorum, as alluring as Ali Baba’s cave.

Rory, now nine years old, coveted all of my teen-age accoutrements. She particularly loved my vanity table even though Mom had never gotten around to attaching the yards of pink polka dot Swiss material she’d purchased for the skirt. I’d let Rory sit at the table and turn on the lights surrounding the make-up mirror because she said it made her feel like she was on TV. I’d let her open my jewelry box and pick out her favorite earrings. Rory’s ears weren’t pierced, so she’d hang the earrings all over her Shirley Temple curls as if she were decorating a Christmas tree. Then, like an African bride, she’d adorn herself with every necklace and bracelet I had.

I’d let her pick one of my favorite perfumes -- Youth Dew, Rive Gauche or L’Air du Temps -- so she could carefully dab some on. She loved the Slickers lip gloss tubes which stood at attention in their Yardley of London enameled coats of white, pink and orange stripes, and I’d let her play with them like they were toy soldiers. I’d let her open the drawer and remove my make-up bag so she could examine the eyelash curler and mascara cake with the little red brush. On rare occasions, I’d let her try on my favorite dress which was made of vermillion crushed velvet and was so long on her she had to hold up the hem in order to walk, just like a princess. I’d let her wear a pair of silver high-heeled sandals that she said looked like glass slippers, and I’d laugh as Rory proudly staggered about in them.

But when I wasn’t home, Rory couldn’t wait to fling aside the No Trespassing sign, climb over the fence of my barbed wire supervision and dive headfirst into the quarry. I knew she coveted my Barbie collection since she’d spent all those years watching me dress them with such care and make them talk what she called grown-up talk but I just wasn’t ready to part with them. So now they were in the closet at the back of the shelf, painstakingly stored in Barbie carrying cases, the gloves, hats, sunglasses, shoes and purses each grouped in their own drawer and the dresses hung on miniature hangers. On the same shelf were my vellum art pads, elegant long brushes with pointed sable tips, and wooden boxes of oil paints, pastels and colored pencils. All she had to do was drag over the ladderback chair from my desk, put the velvet hassock from my vanity table on top of it, and all was within reach!

During these forays she’d leave her spoor, like the undomesticated baby bear she was, in a curious combination of lust and rage. On the vanity table, mud puddles of make-up and perfume dumped out in bewildered frustration. On the bed, tangled heaps of jewelry and make-up-smeared dresses yanked on and off in glutinous frenzy. On the floor, headless Barbies abandoned with torn clothes half pulled on, books removed willy nilly from the bookcase, their pages stained by crushed pastels, squeezed-out tubes of paint and matted brushes orgiastically employed in a vain attempt to be normal, to be like me.

I yelled at Rory but it was like yelling at a puppy who demolished your leather shoe because you left it alone too long. I complained to Mom before she got totally stalled on the couch but she wouldn’t (or couldn’t) do anything to stop it. So I went to the hardware store and bought a padlock and hasp which I crudely screwed into my door and locked each time I left the house. Rory was bereft.

Slowly, our household took on the survival-of-the-fittest mentality of Lord of the Flies (on which I was trying to write a report without much success for my twelfth grade advanced placement English class), especially the part towards the end when the spectacles get smashed and the bloody pig’s head is impaled on a stake. Mom stopped cooking (she’d stopped eating, as well, although no one was aware of this), so on the rare occasions Dad came home he would take Rory and me out for dinner.

Dining with Rory was a dicey proposition since she was not always willing to observe the strict table manners imposed by Dad who’d been a baron in Holland until he became an American citizen at the age of seventeen. On this night, Rory insisted on getting up and walking around the restaurant with a big, white, starched dinner napkin on her head doing a bad Casper the Friendly Ghost imitation before finally settling on the floor at the pianist’s feet. Dad sent me over to retrieve her but Rory wouldn’t budge even when I promised her devil’s food cake and then, in desperation, pinched her arm and twisted the flesh.

When I returned empty-handed, Dad, exasperated, threw down his napkin and said, “I’ll wait in the car,” since he had no tolerance for public displays of any kind. Well, what did he expect? If Rory had managed to resist the tests and ministrations of all the fancy doctors, to dodge Mom’s best efforts, including re-training Rory to crawl using the Dolman Delacato method which involved hours of meticulously manipulating Rory’s limbs in tiny repetitive movements, why then would Rory succumb to Dad, whose aversion to her was so obvious? I finished my meal by myself, hoping that Dad would not drive off without us.

Despite the fact that I had no acting aspirations, I somehow got cast as the mother in the school play, The Bad Seed. It was great except for one thing -- I just couldn't seem to memorize my lines. I'd sit down with the script and study it for hours and it was as if the words changed when I wasn’t looking. I’d seen this movie several times with Mom, who seemed to take great delight in the angelic daughter’s Machiavellian machinations, as if she were thinking, “Well, at least Rory isn’t going around murdering people!” Mom and I often jokingly re-enacted the dialogue between mom and daughter:

Daughter
(artificially affectionate)
“Mother, what would you give me for a basket of kisses?”
Mother
(absurdly grateful)
“Oh, darling, I’d give you a basket of hugs.”

At rehearsals, everybody was off-book except me, and I began to realize I was feeling rather tortured, another one of those walking in cement experiences. Mrs. P'Pool, the teacher in charge, began to give me mild remonstrances, which escalated to severe chastisements and ended with threats to remove me from the play. I couldn’t face failing at anything, even something I didn’t want to do, so to save my role I told Mrs. P'Pool about my mother.

“Thank you for your candor,” Mrs. P’Pool said. “I do believe that is the best excuse I’ve ever heard.”

“I know I can have the part memorized by the time we return from Christmas vacation,” I said, earnestly. “I’ve got a good memory.”

A good short-term memory, perhaps, because there were great chunks of my childhood I couldn’t remember. Only repetitive things like Mom switching my hand, saying “No!” so that I wouldn’t touch Dad’s textbooks all those years he was in college. Mom always said she wanted me to be good so Dad wouldn't leave. Well, guess what! All those years of being good didn't count for nothing since Dad ended up leaving anyway, although technically Mom left first. Later, Mom’s twin sister, Sunny, said Dad was rebelling because he’d never won the Nobel Prize.

_____

After a brief stint in the Navy during World War II in which Dad incurred the wrath of his senior officers by growing a scraggly little goatee in accordance with an outmoded Navy regulation, Dad received his pre-med degree at the University of Cincinnati (where he met Mom in 1943), a Masters in Zoology, as well as forays into optometry and the law at the University of Miami, began work on a Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the University of Maryland (where I was born) and was finishing work on a Ph.D. in Biochemistry at Tulane in New Orleans (where Rory was born). He’d wanted to be a chemical engineer, but when he got out of the Navy (and shaved his goatee), he was told to avoid that field -- possibly the only advice he ever heeded -- since it would likely be flooded by all the returning servicemen.

When the day finally arrived for Dad to take his oral exam to earn his Ph.D., I was four years old. All I remembered of that day was Mom manically pushing me on a swing in a deserted New Orleans park, saying, “We’ve got to pray really hard that Daddy passes. Say it with me, baby. Dear God, let him pass.”

This was the first time I had ever heard anyone pray and I was struck by Mom’s desperate fervor as she burbled about God and passing, like Dad was some gigantic kidney stone. Dad, a vitriolic atheist, had converted Mom from a mild nondenominational belief in God to agnosticism by relentlessly hammering home the ignorance of such beliefs, and did not allow the mention of God or other such atavistic practices in our home.

In spite of Mom’s prayers, Dad failed the oral exam since one of his professors, who was sitting on the panel, "was out to get him." Once Professor Mann discovered Dad had eschewed to bone up on the history of biochemistry because he’d deemed it irrelevant, Professor Mann hammered Dad with questions on the history of biochemistry which he was unable to answer. Dad was the first person in the history of Tulane to fail his orals. Mom was so distraught that she prematurely gave birth to a six and a half month old baby, named Nadine, who lived for only one day. Perhaps because of this, I never saw Mom pray again.

Shortly thereafter, Dad’s older sister, Ybeltje, had a nervous breakdown after divorcing Husband #4, and was looking for a place to park her three kids. Dad, who could be a “selfish bastard” as Sunny later told me, had no qualms about ignoring the plight of his bossy older sister whom he effortlessly excluded from his life. Mom’s selfishness took more altruistic forms. Dad was busy cramming for another pass at his orals, so she hoped the presence of Ybeltje’s oldest daughter, Willa, would distract her from the grief of Nadine’s death. But what she told Dad was that it would be nice to have a little girl around for me to play with since I was such a lonely child.

And that is how Willa, my ten year old cousin, came to stay with us for a year. Willa’s golden pageboy, pretty dresses and patent leather purse struck me as the epitome of perfection, and to my five year old mind, she seemed a Barbie doll come to life. I became her constant shadow, sitting at a respectful distance as boys from the neighborhood, boys whom I’d never seen before, came to court her. Willa was melancholy at times, rejecting at times, but mostly patient and gentle with me. And every night she got into my bed, wrapped her arms around me, and whispered fairy tales in my ear.

_____

Mom mourned the loss of Nadine far longer than people thought healthy. She was still mourning her loss when four years later she gave birth to Rory who seemed at first to be a healthy baby. I lugged Rory around like my own personal dollbaby which was just as well since Mom received her first cancer diagnosis right after Rory was born, although they didn’t call it that, and she went to convalesce with her unsympathetic parents who thought she should be home taking care of her two little girls.

Dad hired Jeannie, who was kind and affectionate, to look after Rory and me. Unfortunately, she made the fatal error of sharing “The Watchtower” with me, and Dad went through the roof when he found out I wanted to become a Jehovah’s Witness. He fired Jeannie on the spot.

Mary Louise came next and although a hard worker, she apparently hated children since she took great delight in tormenting me. She was adroit at devising torture that was not easily detected, such as hiding books that I was in the middle of reading, putting about a cup of salt in my cream of wheat, constantly throwing open the door to catch me at "something dirty" while I was in the bathtub, and allowing Rory to follow me outside, day after day so that I never had a moment to myself, things that made me sound crazy when I finally got up the courage to beg Dad to hire someone else. But Dad told me he didn't have time to hire someone new and I'd just have to get along with Mary Louise.

I can still see Mary Louise, as she used to appear, without warning, in the doorway. She was a big woman, very black, with no indigo or violet to give a sense of translucency to her skin. She was a sooty, impenetrable black, with eyes that grew white with fury. I remembered Mary Louise standing over me, berating me for my underhanded dirtiness, but I do not remember the cause.

_____

“Hey!” Dad said. “Let’s have some fun while you girls are out of school for Christmas vacation! Let’s drive to Orange City and visit your Tante Ybeltje! You and Rory can get to know your cousins.” Ybeltje’s three children, Jules, Willa, and Bebe, were all named after Dutch queens: Juliana, Wilhemina, and Beatrix. Other than Willa, whom I’d not seen since she’d lived with us twelve years before, Rory and I had never met them.

“But what about Mom?”

“Oh, she doesn’t want to go. She says she can use the peace and quiet.”

“But what about Christmas?” Through the kitchen window, I could see Rory running around the back yard like a maniac, playing some bizarre game with herself since none of the neighborhood kids would play with her.

“You think they don’t have Christmas in Florida?”

“But I was supposed to memorize my lines for The Bad Seed.”

“You can do that on the drive down. Come on, let’s have some fun!”

Some fun, I thought, getting to know your lost relatives who were probably lost for a reason.

While Rory and I stood blinking stupidly by the car, feeling exposed by the intense Florida sun, Dad and Ybeltje hugged each other awkwardly and immediately began to speak in Dutch. Other than a little Dutch song Dad often sang at Christmas, I’d never heard him speak Dutch, which was not surprising since I’d read in the Encylopedia Britanica that “only a tiny proportion of the human race speaks Dutch.”

Ybeltje said something in Dutch which I took to be “Merry Christmas!”

The screen door slammed and a short, busty girl with sun-streaked hair came outside. “Oh, look at us!” said Ybeljte in a lilting singsong of English. “I’m forgetting my manners. This is my girl, Bebe. She’s the only one still at home with me.”

“Hi!” said Bebe, pertly.

“Well, come on in,” Ybeltje said. “Jules” (she pronounced it Yules) “and Willa are coming over in a little while.”

Bebe led me into her room, which was an orgasm of pink and more pink, so we could talk privately. “Make yourself comfortable,” Bebe said, sliding a bunch of dolls out of the way with her leg after flopping down on the pouffy pink canopy bed. I pushed a bunch of stuffed animals to the “longue” end of a wicker chaise longue and sat down. Pom-poms and varsity letters covered the walls, and trophies crowded the bureau.

“Are you a cheerleader?” I asked, feeling a twinge of envy. I didn’t want to be a cheerleader, but Mom had talked me into trying out in the ninth grade which led to one of the most humiliating ordeals of my life. During the try-out in the school gym with the whole school watching, I stayed up when everyone else in my group went down and I didn’t catch up with them for the rest of the routine. My discombobulation (and general spasticity) led to my screwing up my individual routine when I suddenly forgot the moves and had to ad lib with embarrassingly lame results.

“Our squad won the state championships three years in a row,” Bebe said. “Hey, how old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

“You’re a senior, right? So am I! You want to go out with me and my boyfriend tomorrow night?”

“Sure,” I said, flattered that Bebe thought I was cool enough to accompany her on a double date.

“Knock, knock,” someone said merrily, before swinging open the door.

“Willa?” I said, trying to keep the disbelief out of my voice, as a woman came in wearing Bermuda shorts and a sweatshirt appliqué-ed with a Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer whose nose lit up. Unaccountably, I felt a tremendous aversion towards Willa, and thinking it was because she had grown lumpily fat, her blonde hair now a dry brown thatch, I felt guilty for the superficiality of my affection.

“Come out and say hi to Jules,” Willa said, after the obligatory awkward hug. Jules was dark and brooding and morose as Heathcliffe, but at least he made no attempt to hug me, for which I was grateful. Once we were all assembled in the living room, I perceived that no one resembled anyone else, most likely because they’d all had different fathers.

Speaking of which, Ybeltje had ditched Husband #7 in 1970, and was having unexpected success building and financing condos. “Just like her mother, Igminia,” Sunny later told me. “That woman could do anything she set her mind to. When your mom and dad were first married Igminia decided to re-upholster a couch for them. She read a book on how to do it, and by God, she did it. Looked professional too. That Ybeltje had never built a house in her life and there she was running around with a construction hat on as if she’d been to architect school! Of course, it didn’t hurt that she’d had the foresight to buy up some land just before Disney World was built.”

The living room was dominated by a fake, crusty white Christmas tree which bulged with so many red satin balls it looked like a small pox victim. Its top was bent over where it hit the ceiling, and piles of cheaply wrapped presents were scattered around its base. I was startled to see several oil paintings of Jesus in gilt frames which didn’t look like reproductions, but weren’t very original in concept.

“Look at all the presents!” Willa squealed girlishly. “We waited for you to get here to open them! Mom! Mom! Can we open our presents now?”

“Sure, sure,” Ybeltje said, indulgently. “Make sure Tilda and Rory get theirs.”

After repeatedly asking Dad for gift ideas to no avail, I’d finally bought a bunch of stuff for Ybeltje and my cousins at the trendy Shop of John Simmons, which I was now certain would not be crowd pleasers even before Willa unwrapped the coke bottle with the elongated neck which held colorful cardboard daisies on long wire stems. She looked at it bemusedly, but was too polite to ask what it was. I’d gotten Bebe incense and a carved wood incense holder, and Jules a rock painting kit. The only person I’d come close to getting right was the scented soap basket I got for Ybeltje.

“Hey!” I said, “Why don’t you guys switch! Bebe, you take the coke bottle, Willa, you take the rock painting kit, and Jules, you take the incense holder.”

They switched with an alacrity that showed how right my hunch was, and actually seemed happy with their gifts. They’d given Dad a crate of citrus fruit, me a manicure set, and Rory a bunch of cheap toys and coloring books which she enjoyed ripping the wrapping off, so all in all it was a surprisingly successful venture considering none of us really knew each other.

During the tumult of Ybeltje and her children unwrapping the rest of their presents, Dad leaned over and handed me a small box wrapped in tin foil. “Don’t open this now,” he whispered, “It’s an ounce of pot.”

I was thrilled at first. Wow! How cool is that?!? My own Dad giving me pot! But then a mild feeling of unease snaked through me. I slipped the box in the Shop of John Simmons shopping bag at my feet, and later hid it in my suitcase.

During a dinner of pot roast, anemic boiled potatoes and grey string beans slathered in oleo margarine (a repast which made Mom’s cooking look like gourmet fare), Dad and Ybeltje seemed to run out of things to say, a sad state of affairs for two people with no other family. They’d emigrated to the United States as teenagers who spoke no English with their mom, Igminia, to avoid the Nazi invasion of Holland. Their father had died when they were children, and Igminia had died before I was born. Igminia’s mom, whom we all called “Oma,” and her aunt, whom we all called Tante Gré, were still alive but they lived in Haarlem, just outside of Amsterdam.

Fortunately, Rory, whose table manners were not much better than Helen Keller’s before Annie Sullivan got her to stop gouging handfuls of food out of other people’s plates, kept things lively. I was under the table trying to get Rory to come out when I heard what sounded like a heated argument between Dad and Ybeltje.

“Half of all Americans believe that the war is morally wrong!” Dad slammed the table hard enough to make the silverware jump. “Half!”

“Well, I’m not in that half. President Nixon says Vietnamization has succeeded and the end is in sight. Why should we withdraw now and waste all the effort we’ve made? And look like cowards to boot.”

“We already look like cowards after the My Lai massacre. Calley killed 22 unarmed civilians -- including women and children.”

“He had to -- they couldn’ve been NVA.”

“If you can’t tell who the enemy is anymore, all the more reason we shouldn’t be there. Mike Mansfield said this war is a tragic mistake and he’s right.”

“Ik vertrouw dergelijke mensen niet!” I do not trust people of that sort!

“Wat ben je toch dom!” How stupid you are!

“In het huis mijns Vaders zijn vele woningen.” In my Father’s house there are many mansions.

“Oh, don’t start that religious crap again!”

I’d stopped trying to wrestle Rory out from under the table and now had her by the ear. Rory started screaming so loud I couldn’t hear anything else. By the time Rory stopped, all the legs had disappeared from under the table. Dinner was, thankfully, over. With Dad gone, it didn’t matter if Rory came out so I emerged alone to find Bebe clearing the table.

When Bebe and I came into the family room after washing the dinner dishes, everyone, including Dad who claimed to hate “the idiot box,” was staring transfixed at an episode of Get Smart on television. I was grateful for the respite. I didn’t think I could bear laboring through another conversation with my two older cousins. Rory crawled into my lap, and before I knew it I had fallen asleep in the big Barca lounge that had been Husband #7’s favorite chair.

I awoke to sun streaming through the window right into my face. For one petrified moment I had absolutely no recollection of where I was, and I feared I’d been institutionalized. But there were no bars on the window and I was wearing my clothes from the day before. Rory was sleeping on the couch. Voices came from another part of the house. Slowly I realized where I was. I couldn’t believe they’d just left me in the family room all night.

I wandered into the kitchen where the aroma of pancakes made my stomach growl. Bebe had created a tower of fat, golden pancakes and she was in the process of transferring what looked like several pounds of bacon from the frying pan onto a platter.

“Sit, sit,” Ybeltje said, as she put a bottle of Aunt Jemima syrup on the table next to a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. “Do you want some juice? We make it from the oranges that grow in our yard.”

“Okay,” I said as I slid onto the sticky seat of a plastic and aluminum kitchen chair. “Where’s Dad?”

“Your father drove back to Nashville early this morning,” Ybeltje said, as if he had just stepped out to get the paper.

“What?” I said. I felt a desperation previously unknown to me. To be left with these people! “But how will we get home?” I wailed.

“Don’t worry about that now. Just enjoy your vacation here with us,” Ybeltje said.

“Yeah,” Bebe said. “We can take Rory to Disney World.”

Oh, that’s something I really want to do, I thought. Chase my hyperactive sister through crowds of people. But it seemed some fake enthusiasm was in order. “Great!” I said as I bit into a jelly doughnut. “Rory will love that!” See -- I could have been a cheerleader!

Upon our return from the Disney World jaunt, during which I had withstood three of Rory’s temper tantrums when we bypassed rides whose lines were too long, endured one trek to the Lost Child Station to retrieve Rory (whom I suspected of running off just to be spiteful), and suffered one spew of vomit on the swirling tea cup ride due to Rory’s unopposed demands for candy bars, ice cream, and cotton candy, all I wanted to do was soak in a nice warm bath where I could possibly slit my veins in peace. But, no! It was time to get ready for my date with Bebe’s boyfriend's buddy, Buddy!

Not only were Buddy and Chip both jocks as evidenced by the letter jackets they wore, they were both unmistakably “crackers,” making me dubious about the feasibility of this double date. But, for the sake of my cousin, I was prepared to give it the old college try. Buddy and I wedged ourselves into the backseat of Chip’s VW Bug, and off we went to dinner at Sammy’s Big Boy where Bebe and Chip started eating French fries out of each other’s mouths and kissing around the straws of the Coke they were sharing.

Bebe and Chip’s petting got heavier once we reached the drive-in movie. Buddy decided to see if all this foreplay had aroused me. It had not. I tried to fight him off silently because it was just too embarrassing to have to say what needed to be said in front of Bebe and Chip. So we played that game where he put his hand somewhere and I removed it. He put it somewhere else and I removed it. All the while, he was giving me slobbering tongue kisses as the swelling strains of Romeo and Juliet filled the Bug.

The movie finally ended and everyone came up for air. But was it over yet? Noooooooooooooooooooooo. It was a double feature. During the intermission, the boys went to the snack stand and the girls went to the bathroom. Bebe had the frowsy swollen look of someone who was drunk on l’amour which was not flattering when illuminated by the harsh fluorescent bathroom lighting.

“So?” Bebe said. “How’s it going with Buddy?” She stood in front of the mirror and began to vigorously brush her hair.

I tried to avoid seeing my own reflection in the mirror. “Uh...”

“Isn’t he cute?” Bebe asked as she smeared pale pink lipstick on her puckered lips. The cinder block bathroom was painted a hideous pea green color which seemed to permeate the room like a noxious gas, and made Bebe look seasick.

“Uh...”

“If Chip and I weren’t going steady I’d go out with him.”

“Uh... How much longer do you think we’ll be here?”

“Oh, we always stay till the end -- but we don’t go all the way!” Bebe winked at me.

“Well, I’m a little tired from all that walking around we did at Disney World today. Aren’t you tired?” I asked, hopefully.

“Come on! The boys are waiting for us!” Bebe popped a piece of Dentyne in her mouth and offered some to me.

“No thanks,” I said. “I’d rather chew some raw garlic.”

“What? Why?”

“Never mind.”

So while the swelling strains of Love Story filled the Bug, I had to once again go mano a mano with Buddy whom I was beginning to loathe. I felt like a dog who’d been left in the car on a hundred degree day. What was worse? Disney World or this date? Was this the worst date I’d ever had? I snapped out of my reverie when I realized that Buddy was trying to get me into a reclining position. I suddenly had had enough. I gave him a big shove which made him go, “Oof!”

“Take your fucking hands off me!” I hissed.

Buddy gave me a wounded look, and then he began to sulk. I stared stonily ahead at the movie, grateful I’d finally had the guts to get him off of me. Sure, I now had to endure an hour of uncomfortable silence during which the soft slurping sounds from the front were acutely audible. As the back seat grew more frigid, the front seat grew more humid, creating a wispy fog so that it was like viewing the movie though gauze. Never again, I told myself. NEVER again.

When it came time to say good night to the boys, I gave Buddy a brief, crisp handshake. I wanted to be polite but not encouraging.

“Nice to meet you,” I said in a monotone. “Thank you for dinner.” Then I turned on my heel and fled, praying the front door was unlocked.

_____

There’s nothing more depressing than Florida when it’s raining and rain it did the rest of the week. I struggled to memorize my lines, and used that as an excuse to withdraw from the family. Thankfully, Bebe made no further efforts to include me in her social life, and Ybeltje seemed to take her cue from Bebe. I took long walks through the piney barrens and fervently longed for the end of this “vacation.” As much as I hated Dad for doing this to me, I couldn’t wait to see him again.

On the Saturday before school was to resume in Nashville, Ybeltje came out onto the sun porch where I was staring at my dog-eared script.

“Well, Tilda,” she said. “Vacation’s over. Pack your bags because your plane leaves in two hours.”

I had to restrain myself from jumping for joy. Then I realized how quiet the house was. “Where’s Rory?”

“Bebe took Rory to get some ice cream. I thought it would be better this way.”

“You mean she’s not coming back with me?”

“No, she’s staying here for a while till your mom gets better.”

“But I can’t leave without saying good bye to her!” I cried. As aggravating as Rory was, I felt as protective of her as if she were my own child.

“It’s better this way, less upsetting for Rory,” Ybeltje said with finality.

I could’ve refused to leave, but I just didn’t have the stamina to stick around. So off I went, feeling like a traitor. It broke my heart to think of Rory coming back all sated with sugar to find that I’d gone. But what was I to do? I suspected if I’d been just a year or two younger, or just a bit more troublesome, I might not have escaped myself. Survival of the fittest prevailed.

On the ride home from the airport, Dad was all hyperactive and “manic-y” as Mom would say. This usually meant he was up to no good. I was afraid to find out what else he had up his sleeve.

“Did you enjoy yourself?” Dad asked.

“Sort of,” I said. “It rained all week.”

“I had to make some changes while you were gone.”

My throat clamped up and I could barely croak, “What?”

“Well, your mom’s not doing so well.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“She’s got cancer.”

I didn’t know what that meant exactly but coupled with my mom’s behavior before the “vacation,” it didn’t sound good. “She’s going to get better, right?” I asked tremulously. As much as Mom and I butted heads, we were extremely attached to one another.

“The doctors say there’s nothing they can do. I’ve hired a nurse to take care of your mother at home. You’ll like her. Her name is Calida.”

“What difference does it make if I like her?” I said, irritably. “She won’t be here that long, will she?” I hadn’t thought of my mom once while I was gone and now I was anxious to see her.

“Well...” Dad didn’t like to dwell on unpleasant things. He always wanted everyone in the house to be cheerful. No “long faces” were allowed.

Calida met us at the door. She was petite and doll-like, with a pretty face and long black hair that fell to her waist. Not exactly the kind of person Mom would’ve hired, I thought, taking an immediate dislike to her. Is she a nurse or a geisha girl?

“You must be Tilda. Welcome home,” she said warmly, with an odd accent -- not quite Hispanic and not quite European.

“Yes,” I said, “Thank you,” as I thought, Who is she to welcome me home? Aloud I said, “Where’s Mom?”

Calida had rented a hospital bed and installed it in the family room so that it faced out the window. Mom, who had deteriorated rapidly in the ten days I was gone, was sitting propped up with lots of pillows. She was staring out the window and had a faint smile on her face.

“Mom!” I shouted. Then, hearing my voice reverberate, I whispered, “Mom!”

She slowly turned her head to me, and opened the hand that was lying between us on the bed. I took it. “Oh, Mom,” I said, choking up. I sat down on a chair, still holding her hand. I didn’t know what to say.

Calida bustled about the room, adjusting the blinds, tucking in the blanket, and checking the ice bucket on the night stand. She put a needle in a vial and withdrew the liquid. “Time for your mother’s medicine!” she said, cheerfully. She inserted the needle into the IV that was attached to Mom’s other hand and pushed the plunger. Mom’s eyes fluttered and then closed.

“She’ll be out for a while. Why don’t you come back later? She needs her rest,” Calida said.

I reluctantly got up and left the room. I went upstairs to unpack. It felt so strange to enter my room and find it exactly as I left it, to be in the house without Rory raising Cain, to not have one ear cocked for what she was up to. I felt a sudden urge to visit Rory’s room. The door was closed and I opened it. I stood on the threshold, appalled at what I saw. Every trace of Rory had vanished. Even the bedspread and curtains were different.

I used to punish Rory by locking her in her room. You had to lock the door or she wouldn’t stay in there. Not like me whom Mom had punished in the same way. I was obedient. After a while, Mom would open the door and say, “Are you ready to be good?” and I, so glad for the reprieve, so eager to be back in her good graces, would smile. Mom would get mad and say, “I can see you’re not taking this punishment seriously,” and slam the door. Over and over again, I would try without success to repress my smile, until I came up with a solution.

Only recently, Mom had said, “You were so cute when you were little! You used to put a pillow case over your head when I punished you. It was so funny!”

“Mom,” I said, “I did that so you couldn’t see my face, and would let me out of my room.”

I remembered with shame how one time I’d forgotten Rory was in there and she’d had to use her waste paper basket as a toilet. But Rory was usually not so docile. One time I was at the kitchen sink doing the dishes when I saw blocks, pull toys, a teddy bear, and a tea set falling from the sky. Rory had decided to rebel by throwing all her toys out the window.

“I hoped to explain to you before you saw this,” Calida said from behind me. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

I turned to face her. “What have you done with Rory’s things?”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “They’re safe in the attic until she returns.”

“And when will that be?” I asked. It was easy to be aggressive with Calida since she was half my height.

She shrugged. “Perhaps you should talk to your father.”

But Dad, of course, was gone, holing up in his refuge, the lab, the perfect hideout since it could only be found by navigating a labyrinth of deserted dim hallways lined in dun-colored tile.

On Monday, I went back to school -- and rehearsal for “The Bad Seed.” I had tried and tried, and failed to memorize my lines. But I refused to give up. Mrs. P'Pool was driven to march down the aisle of study hall the next day and demand in a loud, angry voice that I hand over my script because the part of the mother had been re-cast.