Good In Bed Part 10

But he discovered his true genius after we moved to Pennsylvania. There, the bulk of his practice involved not soldiers but society ladies, women whose only wounds were invisible and who were willing to drop thousands of dollars on a discreet, skilled surgeon who'd make their bellies tight, their eyelids less droopy, who'd eliminate saddlebags and double chins with a few deft strokes of the scalpel.

He was successful. By the time he left us for the first time Larry Shapiro was known as the man to see in the greater Philadelphia area for tummy tucks, chin lifts, nose jobs, b.o.o.b jobs. We had the requisite big house, the curved driveway, the in-ground swimming pool with hot tub in the back. My father drove a Porsche (although, thankfully, my mother was able to talk him out of the NOSEDOC vanity plates). My mom drove an Audi. We had a maid clean twice a week; my parents threw catered dinner parties every other month, and we went on vacations to Colorado (for skiing) and Florida (for sun).

And then he left, and came back, and our lives fell apart, like a well-loved book that you'd read and read again, until one night you picked it up to read yourself to sleep and the binding collapsed, sending dozens of pages spiraling toward the floor. He didn't want this life. That much was clear. He was miserable tethered to this suburb, to the never-ending schedule of soccer games and spelling bees and Hebrew schools, tied down by mortgage payments and car payments, habit and obligation. And he took his misery out on all of us- and, for some reason, on me especially.

Suddenly, it was as if he couldn't bear to look at me. And nothing I could do was right, or even close.

"Look at this!" he'd thunder, of my B+ in algebra. He was sitting at the dining room table, a familiar gla.s.s of scotch at his elbow. I was skulking in the doorway, trying to hide myself in the shadows. "What is your excuse for this?"

"I don't like math," I'd tell him. In truth, I was just as ashamed of the grade as he was angry about it. I'd never gotten anything less than an A in my life. But no matter how hard I tried, or how much extra help I got, algebra confounded me.

"Do you think I liked medical school?" he snarled. "Do you have any idea how much potential you have? Do you have any inkling what a waste it is to squander your gifts?"

"I don't care what my gifts are. I don't like math."

"Fine," he'd say with a shrug, flinging the report card across the table like it had suddenly acquired an offensive smell. "Be a secretary. See if I care."

He was like that with all of us- snarly, surly, dismissive, and rude. He'd come home from work, drop his briefcase in the hall, pour himself the first in a series of scotch on the rocks, and storm by us, upstairs into the bedroom, locking the door behind him. He'd either stay up there, or retreat to the living room, with the lights turned low, listening to Mahler's symphonies. Even at thirteen, even without the benefit of a basic music appreciation cla.s.s, I knew that nonstop Mahler, backed by the rattle of ice cubes in his gla.s.s, could portend nothing good.

And when he did bother to speak to us, it was only to complain: how tired he was, how little appreciated; how hard he worked to provide things for us, "you little sn.o.bs," he'd slur, "with your skis and your swimming pool."

"I hate to ski," said Josh, who did. One run and he'd head back to the lodge to drink hot chocolate and fret, and if we forced him back out he'd convince the Ski Patrol that he was suffering from imminent frostbite, and we'd have to collect him at the first aid cabin, stripped down to his long underwear and basting under the heat lamps.

"I'd rather swim with the other kids at the Rec Center," said Lucy, which was true. She had more friends than the rest of us put together. The phone was always ringing. Another sore spot with my father. "That G.o.dd.a.m.n phone!" he'd yell when it rang during dinner. But we weren't allowed to take it off the hook. It could be his office, after all.

"If you hate us so much, why did you even have kids?" I'd scream at him, taunting him with what I knew was the truth. He never had an answer- just more insults, more anger, more scalding, punis.h.i.+ng rage. Josh, just six, was "a baby." Lucy, who was twelve, he either ignored or berated. "Stupid," he'd say, shaking his head at her grades, "Clumsy," when she'd drop a gla.s.s. And, at thirteen, I became "the dog."

It's true, thirteen was not the year when I was looking my best. In addition to the b.r.e.a.s.t.s and hips I'd sprouted, seemingly overnight, I had acquired a mouthful of complicated-looking metal and rubber bands to correct my overbite. I had a de rigeur Dorothy Hamill haircut, which wasn't doing my full face any favors. I bought clothes in two sizes- baggy and baggier- and spent the whole year in a perpetual stoop, trying to hide my chest. I looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, only with zits and braces. I felt like a walking affront, like a collection of the things my father spent his days waging war against. He was all about beauty- its creation, its maintenance, its perfection. Having a wife who'd fallen short of the mark and hadn't stayed thin was one thing, I supposed... but a daughter who'd failed so flagrantly was, evidently, unforgivable. And I had failed. There was nothing beautiful about me at thirteen, nothing at all, and I could feel that fact confirmed in the hard, hateful way he looked at me, and in all the things he said.

"Cannie's very bright," I heard him tell one of his golf buddies. "She'll be able to take care of herself. Not a beauty," he said, "but smart."

I stood there, hardly believing what I'd heard, and when I finally believed it, I crumpled inside, like a tin can under a car's wheels. I wasn't stupid, and I wasn't blind, and I knew that there were many ways in which I differed from Farrah Fawcett, from girls in movies and on posters in boys' bedrooms. But I'd remembered his hand on my head, his beard tickling my cheek as he kissed me. I was his daughter, his little girl. He was supposed to love me. Now he thought I was ugly. Not a beauty... but what father doesn't think his little girl is beautiful? Except I wasn't little. And, I guessed, I wasn't his girl anymore.

When I look at pictures of myself from that time- and, understandably, there are only about four- there's this horrible desperate look in my eyes. Please like me, I'm pleading, even as I'm trying to hide myself behind a row of cousins at a bar mitzvah, beneath the hot tub bubbles during a pool party, with my lips drawn in a pained smile, stretched tight over my braces, ducking my head into my neck, hunching my shoulders, slouching to make myself shorter, smaller. Trying to disappear.

Years later, in college, when a friend was recounting some bit of suburban childhood horror, I tried to explain how it was with my father. "He was a monster," I blurted. I was an English major, versed in Chaucer and Shakespeare, Joyce and Proust by then. I still hadn't found a better word than that.

My friend's face got very serious. "Did he molest you?" she asked. I almost laughed. Given how much of my father's conversation with me revolved around how ugly, how fat, how hideous I was, molestation was the last thing I would have expected.

"Did he abuse you?" she asked.

"He drank too much," I said. "He left us." But he never hit me. He never hit any of us. It would have been easier if he had. Then there would have been a name we could give it, a box to put it in, a label for the box. There would have been laws, authorities, shelters, TV talk shows where reporters gravely discussed what we were enduring, a built-in recognition of what we'd experienced, to help us through.

But he never raised a finger. And, at thirteen, at fourteen, I had no words for what he was doing to us. I didn't even know how to start that conversation. What would I have said? "He's mean?" Mean meant being grounded, meant no television after dinner, not the kind of daily verbal a.s.sault my father would routinely deliver over the dinner table, a scathing recitation of all the ways I'd failed to live up to my potential, the walking tour of the places that I had failed.

And who would have believed me? My father was always charm personified to my friends. He remembered their names, and their boyfriend's names, he would inquire courteously about summer plans and college visits. They wouldn't have believed me, and if they had they would have wanted me to explain. And I had no explanation, no answers. When you're on a battleground, you don't have the luxury of time to dwell on the various historical factors and sociopolitical influences that caused the war. You just keep your head down and try to survive it, to shove the pages back in the book, close the covers and pretend that nothing's broken, nothing's wrong.

The summer before my senior year of high school, my mother took Josh and Lucy to Martha's Vineyard for the weekend. A friend had a rental house, she was itching to get out of Avondale. I had my first summer job, as a lifeguard at a local country club. I told my Mom that I'd stay home, watch the dogs, hold down the fort. I figured it would be fine: I could have the house to myself, entertain my twenty-three-year-old boyfriend away from her watchful eye, come and go as I pleased.

For the first three days it was fine. Then I came home in the predawn hours of the fourth morning, and it was as if I were twelve again. There was my father in the bedroom, the suitcase on the bed, the stacks of white T-s.h.i.+rts and the piles of black socks- maybe the same ones, I thought wildly, that he'd taken the last time.

I stared at them, and then at him. My father looked at me for a long moment. Then he sighed.

"I'll call," he said, "when I have my new number."

I shrugged. "Whatever," I said.

"Don't talk to me like that!" he said. He hated when we were flip. He demanded respect, even- especially- when he didn't deserve it.

"What's her name?" I asked. He narrowed his eyes.

"Why do you want to know?"

I looked at him and couldn't think of an answer. Did I imagine that it made any difference? Could a name even matter?

"Tell your mother," he began. I shook my head.

"Oh, no," I said. "Don't make me do your dirty work. If you've got something to say, tell her yourself."

He shrugged, like it didn't matter. He added a few more s.h.i.+rts, a fistful of ties.

"I'm glad you're leaving. Do you know that?" I said. My voice was too loud in the early-morning quiet of the house. "We'll be better off without you," I said.

He looked at me. Then he nodded. "Yes," he said, "I think maybe you will."

He went back to his packing. I went back to my bedroom. I lay on the bed- the bed where my father had read to me, a million years ago- and closed my eyes. I'd been waiting for this, after all. I'd known it was coming. I thought it would feel the way it does when a scab over an old wound finally falls off- a momentary pang, a little bit of pain, a sense of absence. Then nothing. Just nothing at all. That was what I was supposed to feel, that was all I wanted to feel, I thought fiercely, tossing and turning on my bed, trying to find comfort. It didn't matter, I told myself, over and over again. I just couldn't figure out why I was crying.

I went to Princeton because he told me to, in one of his last acts of hands-on parenting. I'd wanted to go to Smith. I liked the campus, liked the crew coach, liked the idea of an all-girls' school, where the focus would be on learning, where I could be free to be who I was: your basic late-eighties model nerd with her nose in a book.

"Forget it," my father p.r.o.nounced over the table. He'd been gone for six months by then: relocated to a new suburb, living in a brand-new, s.h.i.+ny condo with a brand-new s.h.i.+ny girlfriend. He'd agreed to meet us for dinner, then cancelled and rescheduled twice. "I'm not sending you to some d.y.k.e school."

"Larry," said my mother, her voice quiet and hopeless. All of her good humor and cheer had been leeched from her by then. It would be years- and Tayna- before she laughed and smiled easily.

My father ignored her, glaring at me suspiciously, a forkful of steak raised halfway to his mouth. "You aren't a d.y.k.e, are you?"

"No, Dad," I said, "I actually prefer threesomes."

He chewed. Swallowed. Patted his lips with his napkin. "That's two more people than I'd have thought would be interested in seeing you naked," he said.

As much as I'd liked Smith, I hadn't liked Princeton. The campus looked like the staging ground for a very successful eugenics experiment: everyone was blond, preppy, and perfect, except for the dark-haired girls who were sleek, exotic, and perfect. During the weekend I'd spent there I hadn't seen a single fat person, or anyone with bad skin. Just acres of s.h.i.+ny hair, straight white teeth, and perfect bodies in perfect clothes arrayed beneath the perfect willow trees that grew beneath perfectly Gothic stone halls.

I said I'd be miserable. My father said he didn't care. I dug my heels in. He told me it was Princeton or nothing. And by the time I'd been packed off to Campbell Hall and stayed long enough to start cla.s.ses and have my graduation-present mountain bike stolen from the library bicycle rack, the divorce was final, and he was gone for good, sticking us with a tuition bill of which he'd paid just enough to make it impractical for me to start over anywhere else. So I quit the crew team- no big loss to me, or the team, I suspect, since I'd gained the requisite Freshman Fifteen, plus the fifteen pounds my roommate should have gained but didn't, thanks to her diligent bulimia- and got a job with the Department of Food Services, affectionately known as Doofus to its employees.

If college is supposed to be the best years of your life, then it's safe to say that I spent the best years of my life in a hairnet, dis.h.i.+ng out reconst.i.tuted scrambled eggs and limp bacon, loading dirty dishes on the conveyor belt, mopping the floors, looking at my cla.s.smates out of the corner of my eyes and thinking that they were all so much more beautiful, graceful, comfortable in their own skins than I could ever be. They all had better haircuts. And all of them were thin. True, many of them were thin because they were sticking their fingers down their throats after every meal, but at times that seemed like a small price to pay for having basically everything a woman could want- brains, beauty, and a way to eat ice cream and cherry Danishes and still stay skinny.

"Good Hair" was the first article I wrote for the campus alternative newspaper. I was a freshman, and the editor-in-chief, a junior named Gretel whose own hair was kept in a paramilitary blond brush cut, asked me to write more. By soph.o.m.ore year I was a columnist. By junior year I was a senior writer, spending every hour I wasn't slinging hash or pus.h.i.+ng a mop in the Na.s.sau Weekly's cramped, dusty offices in Aaron Burr Hall, and I'd decided that this was what I wanted to do with my life.

Writing let me escape. It let me escape Princeton, where everyone was chic and stylish and, in the case of the guy down the hall, the future ruler of some minor Middle Eastern princ.i.p.ality. It let me escape the insistent tug of my family, and its ongoing misery. Writing was like slipping into the ocean, a place where I could move easily, where I could be graceful, and playful, and invisible and visible all at once- a byline, not a body. Sitting in front of the computer, with the screen blank and the cursor blinking, was the best escape I knew.

And there was plenty to escape from. In the four years I was at Princeton, my father remarried and had two more children. Daniel and Rebecca. He had the nerve to send me pictures, and birth announcements. Did he think I'd be happy, seeing their squinched-up baby faces and tiny baby footprints? It felt like being kicked. It wasn't that he didn't want children, I realized sadly. It was that he hadn't wanted us.

My mother went back to work, and her weekly telephone calls were full of complaints about how schools, and kids, had changed since she got her teaching certificate. The subtext was clear: This wasn't the life she signed up for. This wasn't where she expected to be, at fifty, making ends meet on alimony and what the local school board paid permanent subst.i.tutes.

Meanwhile, Lucy had flunked out of her first year at school in Boston, and was living at home, attending community college haphazardly, and majoring in unsuitable men. Josh was spending three hours a day in the gym, lifting weights so frequently that his upper body looked inflated, and had pretty much stopped talking except for a series of tonal grunts and the occasional "Whatever." "Just get your education," my mother would say wearily, after the latest recitation of how my father's checks were late again, of how her car had broken down, of how my sister hadn't come home for two nights in a row. "Just finish up. We'll be fine."

Then- finally- it was the June of my graduation.

Except for a handful of strained lunches during the summer and Christmas breaks, I hadn't seen my father. He sent birthday cards (usually on time), and tuition checks (almost always late) and usually for about half of what they were supposed to be. I felt like I'd become just one more unremarkable item on his to-do list. I hadn't expected him to come to my graduation. I never thought he'd care. But he called me a week in advance of the much-longed-for date, saying that he was looking forward to it. Him, and his new wife, whom I'd never met.

"I'm not sure... I don't think... ," I stammered.

"Cannie," he said. "I'm your father. And Christine's never seen Princeton!"

"So tell Christine you'll send her a postcard," my mother said sourly. I had dreaded telling my mother that he'd be there, but I couldn't figure out how to tell him no. He'd said the magic words, the pellet words. I'm your father. After everything- his distance, his desertion, the new wife and new kids- I was, it seems, still starving for his love.

My father, with new wife and kids in tow, arrived during the English Department's reception. I'd won some small award for creative writing, but they came too late to hear my name called. Christine was a pet.i.te little thing, with an aerobicized hard body and a blond perm. The children were adorable. My floral Laura Ashley dress had looked just fine in the dorm. Now it looked like a slipcover, I thought dismally. And I looked like a sofa.

"Cannie," said my father, looking me up and down. "I see college cuisine's agreed with you."

I clutched my stupid plaque tightly against me. "Thanks so much," I said. My father rolled his eyes at his new wife as if to say, Can you believe how touchy she is?

"I was just teasing you," he said, as his new adorable children stared at me, as if I were an animal in a zoo for the oversized.

"I, um, got you tickets for the ceremony." I didn't mention that I'd had to beg, borrow, and finally pay $100 I couldn't spare to score the tickets. Each senior was issued a total of four. The administration at Princeton hadn't yet made accomodations for those of us struggling with reconstructed families that included stepmothers, stepfathers, new half-siblings, and the like.

My father shook his head. "Won't be necessary. We're leaving in the morning."

"Leaving?" I repeated. "But you'll miss graduation!"

"We've got tickets to Sesame Place," chirped his little wife, Christine.

"Sesame Place!" repeated the little girl for emphasis.

"So Princeton was sort of on our way."

"That's... um... well." And suddenly I was blinking back tears. I bit my lip as hard as I could, and squeezed the plaque against me so tightly that I had an eight-by-twelve bruise on my midsection for the next week and a half. "Thanks for stopping by."

My father nodded, and moved as if he was going to hug me, but wound up merely grasping my shoulders and giving me the kind of shake that coaches routinely administer to underperforming athletes- a "buck up, camper" kind of shake. "Congratulations," he said. "I'm very proud of you." But when he kissed me his lips never even touched my skin, and I knew the whole time that his eyes were on the door.

Somehow I made it through the ceremony, the dismantling of my dorm room, the long ride home. I hung my diploma on my bedroom wall and tried to figure out what I'd do next. Graduate school was out of the question. Even after all those breakfasts I'd worked, all those drooly pieces of bacon and curdled scrambled eggs, I was still $20,000 or so in debt. I couldn't see borrowing more money. So I lined up job interviews with the handful of small papers who were willing to even consider a college graduate with no real-world experience, in the middle of a recession, and spent the summer driving up and down the Northeast in the thirdhand van I'd bought with some of my food-service dollars. When I loaded up the car to head out for my job interviews, I made myself a promise- I wasn't going to be my father's rat anymore. I was going to walk away from the pellet bar. He could bring me nothing but unhappiness, and I didn't need more unhappiness in my life.

I heard from my brother that our father had moved out West, but I didn't ask for specifics, and n.o.body offered them. Ten years after the divorce he no longer had to pay child support or alimony. The checks stopped coming. So did the birthday cards, or any acknowledgment that we even existed. Lucy's graduation came and went, and when Josh sent a card announcing his, it came back returned to sender. Our father had moved on, it seemed, without telling us where.

"We could find him on the Internet or something," I offered. Josh glared at me.

"Why?"

And I couldn't think of an answer. If we found him, would he come? Would he care? Probably not. We agreed, the three of us, to let it be. If our father wanted to stay gone, we would let him.

And we struggled into our twenties without him. Josh overcame his fear of the slopes and spent a year and a half drifting from one ski-resort town to another, and Lucy ran off briefly to Arizona with a guy she claimed was a former professional hockey player. As evidence, she'd had him remove his bridge in the middle of dinner and show that he was missing all his teeth.

And that was that, pretty much.

I know that what had happened with my father- his insults, his criticism, the way he made me feel that I was defective and deformed- had hurt me. I'd encountered enough of those self-help articles in women's magazines to know that you don't go through that kind of cruelty unscathed. With every man I met I'd watch myself carefully. Did I really like that editor, I'd wonder, or am I just searching for Daddy? Do I love this guy, I'd ask myself, or do I just think he'd never leave me, the way my father did?

And where had all the care I'd taken gotten me, I wondered? I was alone. A man who'd liked me enough to want me in his family was dead, and I couldn't even say how sorry I was properly. And now that it was possible- now that it was likely, even- that Bruce had finally gotten to the point in his life where he could understand me, where he could sympathize with what I'd been through because of what he'd gone through- he wouldn't even talk to me. It felt like the cruelest joke, like a rug being yanked out from under me- in other words, like the way my father made me feel, all over again.

SEVEN.

The scales at the University of Philadelphia's Weight and Eating Disorders Center looked like meat carts. The platforms were about four times the size of normal scales, with railings all around them. It was hard not to feel like livestock when you climbed aboard, as I had every other week since September.

"That's very unusual," said Dr. K, gazing down at the red digital printout on the scale. "You lost eight pounds."

"I can't eat," I said numbly.

"You mean you're eating less," he said.

"No, I mean every time I put something in my mouth I puke."

He looked at me sharply, then back at the scale. The numbers were the same. "Let's step into my office," he suggested.

And there we were again: me in the chair, him at his desk, my ever-thickening folder spread in front of him. He was tanner than when I'd seen him last, and possibly even thinner, floating in his white laboratory coat. It had been six weeks since I'd last seen Bruce, and things were not proceeding as I'd hoped.

"Most patients gain weight before we start them on the sibu-tramine," he said. "They have a kind of last hurrah. So, as I said, this is unusual."

"Something happened," I said.

He looked at me sharply. "Another article?"

"Bruce's father died," I said. "Bruce, my boyfriend... ex-boyfriend. His dad died last month."

He looked down at his hands, at his folder, then, finally, up at me.

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"And he called me... and told me... and asked me to go to the funeral... but he wouldn't let me stay. Wouldn't let me stay with him. He was so awful... and it was so sad... and the rabbi said how he used to go to toy stores, and I feel so terrible..."

I blinked hard against the tears. Wordlessly, Dr. K. handed me a box of Kleenex. He took off his gla.s.ses and pressed two fingers against the bridge of his nose.

"I'm a bad person," I blubbered. He looked at me kindly.

"Why? Because you broke up with him? That's silly. How could you know this was going to happen?"