My Three Husbands (2 page)

Then there was that birthday with Daddy. That's what he and Mom both told me it was going to be. But it wasn't just with Daddy. As Daddy pulled up to the big house, I saw Whitman in the front seat of the BMW. That had to mean something important, but I didn't want to know what it was. I was sick with tight-lipped apprehension as Daddy took my hand and led me down to the car. Whitman smiled out the open window. “You remember Whitman?” Daddy said, opening the
back
door of the BMW.

I shook my head. Whitman laughed. I felt panicky.

“Whitman's coming with us today. For your birthday.”

“I don't want him,” I whispered.

“Well, honey, he's going to be with us today,” Daddy said in a low firm voice.

I started to squirm as Daddy buckled me into a seatbelt. In the backseat. I
always
rode in front, next to him. “No!”

“Venus—” That tone. I hated that “you have no choice” tone.

I looked anxiously back toward the big house, but it seemed to mock me, mock my fear. I saw Mom standing upstairs, in the front turret, her arms crossed. Then she disappeared.

Whitman turned around and smiled at me. “Happy birthday, Venus. I brought you a present.”

I calmed myself sufficiently to snatch the beautifully wrapped package he held out.

“What do you say, honey?” Daddy prompted.

I thought for a moment before answering. “Fuck you,” I said.

I didn't know what the words meant, but I'd heard Mom's support group using them. And they seemed to have some magic effect because Whitman's eyes opened so wide I could see his contact lenses. He stared at me for a moment, then said, “You're welcome,” and turned back around.

Birthdays in Portland were for little girls who lived at home with their overloving lesbian moms. Birthdays in New York were for “The Fabulous Miss Venus Gilroy” (as Whitman called me) who flew off all by herself four times a year to spend a week with her handsome dad and his handsome lover in their cramped Manhattan apartment. When I was in New York, I rarely let on that I was having a good time, but fun did seep into those always-too-short visitations. One birthday they took me to the Rainbow Room, where I drank Shirley Temples and danced with Daddy on the revolving dance floor and Whitman never once butted in. Another time they took me to lunch at Windows on the World and we all had foie gras on toast. I could always count on a Broadway show, usually a musical with some big star. It never ceased to amaze me that people I'd seen on television or in movies with my mom were there, alive, on a stage. New York birthdays were one big, new, scary, shivery delight after another: an opera, a concert at Lincoln Center, a show at Radio City Music Hall. A new dress from Bloomingdale's, shoes from Bergdorf, a winter coat from Saks. And when I'd get back to Portland with all my shopping bags and looked at the stuff my mom had given me for the same event, I could barely suppress my disdain. Sometimes it actually seemed like the dads knew me better than my mom did.

 

 

I pulled up in front of my mom's dinky little house (“Early Crackerbox,” I once heard Whitman describe it) and sat there, smoking and listening to my old Black Garters tape. Black Garters was this awesome all-girl garage band that lasted about a year. JD, lead singer and lead guitar, gave me the band's one and only demo tape when we were lovers. Her singing voice was a hoarse, croaky rasp of anger.

I just sat there in my incredibly messy car (Whitman had once likened it to a hamster's nest) thinking about my mom, my dads, and me. If you eventually turn into your parents, no matter how hard you try not to, which one of the three was I doomed to become?

 

 

Long ago, back in the mists of the '80s, even before my dad left us, I realized that I could twist Carolee, my mom, around my little finger. I could get her to do anything I wanted.

It's kind of horrifying, in a way, to realize how much power you can have over another person. What intrigues me about Whitman, for instance, is that I have zero power over him. Back when I was five, and Dad was just starting to date him, Whitman and I would get into stupid fights over things like who got to sit next to Daddy in the front seat of the BMW. I always won. But it was because Whitman let me. He could afford to because he had the real power, and we both knew it. He had Daddy.

And Carolee didn't. Not anymore.

When Dad left, all Carolee had was her “support group”—this huge congregation of women bitching and bawling their way through the pain, pain, pain of wrecked dreams and fractured lives. My mom was the focal point, the earth mother, the good witch doomed to stir the cauldron of unconditional love until she keeled over from the fumes.

She was a size eight back then. She was my size, and my age, which is too freaky to think about.

They came, all those women, because Carolee had the biggest heart and the nicest house and the largest alimony check. Back then we lived in a huge old Victorian that Daddy had turned into a showplace. Some of Mom's endless women friends hung out there so much they had their own rooms. “You could almost call 'em boarders,” my grandma sourly observed, “if they ever paid any rent.”

During the year they were separated, Daddy continued to pay the mortgage and all the bills. And after the divorce, Mom had alimony for three years and child support until I was eighteen. So she didn't have to work back then, except to take care of every freeloading sob sister who showed up at our door.

I took advantage of her like everyone else. I got everything I wanted because my own mother was afraid of me. If I didn't get my way I turned into Linda Blair in
The Exorcist.
It worked every time.

Until one day I made the mistake of calling my mom a “fucking bitch” in front of my grandma. Mom let out a weird noise and started to cry. But Grandma's hand shot out and slapped me so hard I went blank with terror. And in that moment of shocked blankness, Grandma, furious in a way I'd never seen before, leaned down and said through her new dentures, “Don't you
ever
call your mother that again, young lady. Do you understand?”

I nodded dumbly. It was the first time in my life that I'd been disciplined, and it was overwhelming.

“When you say that, it means you have no respect,” Grandma hissed. “You should always respect your mother because she does her best for you.”

Mom, of course, got furious with her mom for slapping me because I'd never been spanked or physically mistreated in my life. I played it up for all it was worth, loving the way Carolee's dark eyes glowed with fiery maternal indignation and concern. It meant I'd be getting more presents than usual.

But I have to say: Grandma's smack and admonition did work. I heard what she said. I remembered. Her slap sent me flying into a new phase of understanding, or trying to, anyway.

Respect. Like that old Aretha Franklin song. Mom with her big hair deserved
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
.

But then the dynamic changed and Mom began sucking me into her confidence. Every night she drank a bottle of red wine, drew me close, and told me all the scary non-fairy tales that turn bratty little girls into fucked-up women. What she didn't know was that her life was territory I didn't want to explore. It was dark and scary and lonely in that forest. There were horrible monsters hiding behind every tree.

Daddy had been her one fairy tale come true. A young hot-shit architect, he plucked her from the receptionist's desk, married her, and introduced her to a world of high-flying affluence that just about wrecked them both. Mom had just divorced her first husband, a Sixties radical who got busted for selling LSD at UCLA. Dad had just been divorced by a mysterious Italian woman who ran off after she became an American citizen.

John gave Carolee this short, fabulous life. Then he took it away. She wasn't Cinderella after all. The glass slippers shattered into slivers that pierced her feet and made them bleed. That wasn't a diamond tiara perched high atop her big red hair; it was a dunce cap.

Mom never blames anyone for anything. She's chronically unable to express hatred and anger. She tried to understand where her husband was coming from. She even tried to support his decision to leave her for a man. But other betrayed women in her support group kept telling her how awful Daddy was, how selfish. I heard what they said. Daddy was just another incomplete, incompetent, insensitive man, and she was a wimp if she didn't take him for all he was worth. Under their influence, Mom began ragging Daddy constantly. Never to his face, because she was afraid of him. She did it in private, to me.

I began to see Daddy in a very different light, one that made me resent him for what he was doing to us. His side of the story didn't matter because he was the one who fractured our fairy tale.

Then Carolee got into this weird competition thing. If Daddy was gay, and dating a person of the same sex, then she would, too. God knows there were enough lesbians in the nonstop cotillion passing through our beautiful old house.

Only Mom didn't get a Whitman. She didn't get a rich handsome younger man who spoke foreign languages and wrote travel books.

She got Jerri. A possessive, alcoholic dyke who spent her life spinning the same ugly brown clay mug over and over on her potter's wheel. I never could see what the attraction was. Mom was so pretty. Jerri was thirty years older, with short-cropped gray hair and false teeth that looked too big for her mouth. They met at one of the endless garage sales Mom and her friends were always throwing.

Their affair lasted about two years. Jerri was subtly abusive when sober, insanely jealous and violent when drunk. One night she hauled off and belted my mom across the face. It was true-blue black-and-blue physical abuse. One woman smacking another. I saw it with my own two eyes.

Saw that shocked look on Mom's face before it crumpled into tears. She probably felt like I did that one time Grandma slapped me.

But Mom didn't even have the balls to order Jerri out of the house. All she could do was politely ask the cunt to leave. But of course, as I know all too well, the sick sweetness behind abusive behavior comes afterward, when the abuser is contrite and the abused is forgiving. The puke of souped-up emotions between Mom and Jerri made me sick and fearful.

It was so different when I was with Daddy and Whitman. They had this breezy affability with one another. They were full of secret looks and jokes. I resented their happiness because I knew it didn't include me. And I couldn't figure out why they were so happy. There was no sign of physical affection between them, no terms of endearment spoken. Whitman wouldn't allow it. When my eagle eyes caught Daddy trying to stroke Whitman's ass or pull him into an embrace, Whitman always cut it short. Once I heard him whisper, “Not in front of her.”

Her.

That was me.

For five years I was shuttled back and forth between the big beautiful house where Mom lived with her female support group (and more and more junk and clutter), and the austere apartments where Daddy and Whitman lived with just a few sticks of designer furniture.

It was all very complicated. But it was what I knew.

It was my life.

 

 

Mom, the former receptionist, doesn't answer the phone much anymore. She can't say no to anyone, no matter what they're selling, so she filters calls. I pulled out my old cell phone, so outdated and clunky that nobody even wants to steal it, and called her from my car. I said what I always say: “It's me. Pick up if you're in there.”

She was on the line instantly. “Where are you, sweetheart?”

“Outside.”

She drew back the curtain. We waved at one another. “Lock your car if you're coming in, sweetheart. There's been a lot of gang activity lately.”

A moment later she unlocked the three locks, drew me in, and quickly relocked the door. “I heard gunshots last night,” she said.

Mom was wearing black polyester lounging pants with an elastic waistband and a long, flowing, floor-length robe with a pattern of silvery lines in the weave. Thanks to some really bad fashion advice she had new glasses with white, laptop computer-size frames. The one thing she never gave up was her big hair, still piled high atop her head and dyed a shade of red you only see in early Technicolor.

The house was stuffy because she'd had the windows painted shut. One of her doctors told her she might be allergic to dust, so now air filters and deionizers hummed in all four rooms.

She muted the old black-and-white movie playing on her VCR. Bette Davis, with big gluey tears in her eyes, was pleading with some guy for something or other. Mom's a real Bette Davis freak. Back when she smoked and drank, she used to do bad Bette Davis imitations at parties.

She gingerly embraced me, afraid to pull me too close because I smelled like cigarette smoke. One of Mom's doctors told her she might be allergic to it. This was after years of smoking two packs a day and inhaling down to her toenails.

“Well, to what do I owe the honor of this visit?” she asked, using her gentle “what did you do in day care today” voice.

I shrugged and collapsed onto her overstuffed sofa.

“Is something wrong?” she asked warily.

I shook my head.

“Do you need money?” She started for her purse.

“That's not why I came over.”

“You're all dolled up, sweetheart. High heels and everything. You look bee-you-ti-ful. Did you just come from someplace fun?”