at me, I moved from being someone who they at least tried to take care of to someone they expected to assist them in cleaning up their messes.
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
