How to Cook Your Daughter (2 page)

FOR MANY CHILDREN, DEATH IS ONE OF THEIR FIRST
vivid memories. Usually, it's a grandparent or great aunt, someone distant, someone old. You see your parents cry, perhaps for the first time. And it startles you. But they console and soothe you, they reassure you because they know that you can't possibly understand death, not when you are just four years old.

For me, the man who died was in his twenties—about the same age as my mother and father. And though I was four and too young to understand exactly what had happened, I was old enough to be scared.

They found him in his Hollywood apartment, and those who knew him—my parents included—gathered the next day in the living room of a friend's house. I was sure—absolutely convinced—that his body lay somewhere in that house. I still remember how I clung to my mother, my wide eyes searching the pale, shocked faces. They seemed at least as scared as I was, huddling on the couches as if they were telling secrets—whispering and hushed, as though whatever killed their friend lurked just around the corner. They said he'd “OD'd,” but
of course, that meant nothing to me. Then “choked on his own vomit.” Then: “Poor Chris. Heroin killed him.” What I saw, what I was
sure
would happen in just a few seconds, was the man walking toward me, covered in vomit, snarling with his nose and mouth and body dripping with this black goo “heroin.” Behind him there'd be a trail.

Heroin. I wanted nothing more than to get away from that house, to go play with my sister, Kathy, in the sun, to go home to Laurel Canyon. But I had to stay here with adults who seem as bewildered as me. And I was terrified:
Would Heroin get me too?

It's not the most ideal of childhood memories. But you have to consider the time (1969) the place (California) and of course, the parents. Mine had come thousands of miles from England to experiment with the Southern California scene of the late 1960s. They were born during the Second World War, part of the generation that would be responsible for the Swinging Sixties. My mother grew up in Wimbledon, a suburb of London. Her father, Alfred Christmas, owned a chemist's shop. She, her sister, and her brother lived with my grandmother and grandfather in a mock Tudor house built on a lot leveled by a V-bomb in the waning years of the war. My grandfather spent his time growing roses and humming. Kind but emotionally reserved, he had a habit of walking with his arms behind his back, his right arm bent with the hand clutching his left arm, as if holding himself back. My grandmother proved warmer than her husband. On our visits, she played with us and baked jam tarts and Victoria sponge cakes for afternoon tea.

One of her great sorrows was her name: Doris. My grandmother said my great-grandparents had planned to name her Kathleen. But at her christening, when the godfather was asked to name the child, he announced—much to the horror of the assembled relations—“I name the child Doris.” And Doris she would stay. When I heard the story
some years ago from my mother, I asked, with a degree of skepticism, what any American of my generation would: “Why didn't her parents say anything?” At the same time, I was saying to myself:
because they were English.
As I can attest, the value of keeping silent for the sake of maintaining family peace seems to run in our veins.

Doris and Alfred named their second child—my mother—Judith. But for much of her life, Judith was Judy. I imagine it must have been hard being called “Judy Christmas.” As I told my mother during one of my more obnoxious moments as a teenager, it seemed a name more suitable for a stripper than for an intellectually gifted and talented girl like my mom, who became the bright light of her family by earning a place at Girton College, University of Cambridge.

Anthony Hendra, my dad, was born the son of a stained-glass maker and raised in rural Hertfordshire, the region in which Jane Austen set
Pride and Prejudice
. Even as a child, he seems to have been eccentric. My grandma Georgina told me how little Anthony used to ram his tri-cycle at top toddler speed into a brick wall over and over and over again. “All day long, just riding right into the wall,” Grandma Georgina said with a smoker's laugh. My uncle recounted how my father, then a teenager and obsessed with becoming a monk, instructed his brother and sisters to send letters to the Pope recommending one Anthony Christopher Hendra for sainthood. The Pope failed to respond.

My father, like my mother, was tremendously gifted intellectually. To his family's surprise (but no one else's), he easily won a scholarship to Cambridge. Initially, he resisted accepting the place, having already decided on his vocation as a novice in a Benedictine monastery. But at the insistence of the more senior monks, he went off to the university.

It was at Cambridge in about 1962 that my parents met. By this time, my father had put his monastic aspirations in the deep freeze
and instead embraced the world of earthly delights. By the end of her senior year, my mother was very pregnant. At twenty-two and dreaming of success as a comedian, my father was understandably reluctant to marry. My mother, more in love with my dad than he was with her, could neither face an abortion nor give the baby up for adoption. So, unsure of what was going to happen, she continued on with her pregnancy. In her Cambridge graduation pictures, though unmarried and visibly with child, my mother wears her gown and rounded stomach with pride. She smiles into the camera defiantly, holding her diploma over the spot where her illegitimate baby—my sister, Katherine—grows. She is beautiful, her long hair untidily looped in a Bronte-like bun, a concession to the formality of the occasion. My grandparents stand awkwardly on either side of her: my grandfather in his gray Sunday best, my grandmother in a Queen Mother hat. To me they look confused, caught between the pride they feel in their daughter having graduated from the best university in England and their mortification over her obvious “condition.”

In the end, sometime after my sister's birth, my parents did marry, and they spent their honeymoon night in Paris. My mother said it was wonderful. My father said it rained and called it the worst night of his life. And so their marriage began.

In 1964, a year before I was born, my parents immigrated to America—first to the East Coast, a place where my father had visited to test the comedy waters. He and his stand-up comedy partner, Nick Ullett, had met with some success there, and the opportunities in the States seemed greater than in London. I was born in New York, where my parents had a fifth-floor walk-up apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Not ones for baby-naming books, my parents turned to the pages
of the
Collected Works of Shakespeare
, just as they had when my sister was born. She was named Katherine after the long-suffering but tough-as-nails Katherine of Aragon in
Henry VIII.
I became Jessica from
The Merchant of Venice.

Our names foretold our futures. Kathy spent a childhood as “Thunder Thighs,” a name my father coined for her. She persevered by throwing herself into her studies. Today, she's a doctor.

My name seems even more prescient. At the end of
The Merchant of Venice,
Jessica faces a decision a daughter dreads: to follow her heart, thus betraying her father, or to stay true to him and betray herself. And so I was given not a name that I hated, like my grandmother's, or a diminutive one as unfitting as my mom's, but one that foreshadowed a future that no one in my family could have imagined.

By the time I was born, my father had begun his career as a satirist and comedian. At Cambridge he performed with John Cleese and Graham Chapman. Soon after coming to America, the comedy team of Hendra and Ullett appeared on
The Ed Sullivan Show
(Dad and Nick believed Sullivan understood less than half of what they were saying but loved their accents). Dad was brilliant, charming, witty, and gregarious, especially to those who didn't know him well. But he struggled. Despite his talent, he couldn't crack the TV world. What he wrote was too racy, too clever, or just not right. And so, Hollywood wouldn't be for us—or, more aptly, for him.

I have only two other vivid memories of California—whirling around and around on the Mad Hatters Tea Party Ride until I threw up all the treats I had consumed for my sixth birthday and waking up in a shaking bed to the sound of breaking glass and the eerie rumble of an earthquake. For me, death by overdose, Disneyland, and earthquakes summed up L.A. in the late 1960s.

I do, however, remember the day we left Los Angeles in the early summer of 1971.

My mother prodded me gently. “Jessie, you need to wake up.” It was still dark in the room where Kathy and I slept, and I could hear only faint twittering from the birds in the fruit trees in the garden. For a second, I wondered if there was another aftershock from the earthquake—if my mom was waking me to stand under a doorway until the hanging light fixture in the living room finally stopped swaying. But the world appeared still, and Kathy was already sitting up in bed, her brown hair messy.

“We have to leave today,” my mother reminded me.

Yes. Leaving. Today we'd be starting a drive that would take us all the way across the country, back to the house in New Jersey where I had lived when I was two. I sat up. Despite the mixture of memories, I didn't want to leave this place. There was my school on Wonderland Avenue, my friends, the playground down at the bottom of the canyon. But maybe the house where we were going wouldn't shake like this one. Maybe Heroin wouldn't be there. And they did have winter, with real snow and everything.
What did it feel like? Did it smell? What was it like to be really cold? What was it like to be bundled up in a big coat, a scarf, and boots as I had seen in the stories at school?

My mother told us we could keep our nighties on. There was no point getting dressed if we didn't want to. Still groggy, Kathy and I walked through our bedroom doorway, along the hallway, and followed my mother's slim, tall figure out the front door of a house that we would never see again.

My father was loading bags into the Volkswagen bus. He moved quickly and, despite being in one of his “heavy stages,” looked strong as he hefted the bags. The bus was white, with brown-and-red paisley
curtains on the back. Its look was shabby but friendly, as though it were saying “It might be tough, man, but I'll do my best to get you there.” In the back lay a mattress, the closest thing we had to car seats. There, we would sleep at night and perch during the long days of driving.

“Why are we going now, Daddy?” I asked. “It's still dark.”

“We have to leave before the landlord wakes up,” he said matter-of-factly. “He's a vampire and just went to bed.”

I was still groggy but that woke me up. “Oh,” I said, not sure if my dad were joking. It was always hard to tell with him. Like the other night when the police had pulled us over for speeding. The cop shone a flashlight in the back seat of the car and told my father to take the “little girls home.” When the officer walked away, my father turned to us: “They always take the children to jail first, you know, girls.”

When everything was packed, we climbed into the VW, and Daddy started the cheery engine. Kathy and I lay down in the back. I clutched the tattered mass of wool that had morphed from a baby blanket into my most precious possession. I called it, simply, “Mine.” Then I watched out the back window as Laurel Canyon disappeared.

“We're off!” my father shouted into the early morning light. And so we were, a family making its way across the country in the true American pioneer tradition. Except we were going from west to east. And my father, the comedian and satirist, wasn't looking to settle the country like the pioneers of the 1860s. He planned to unsettle it.

We drove all day and ended up spending that night somewhere in the Utah desert. But the job of getting to New Jersey was proving hard for the valiant VW. The next morning, I woke up to the sound of a choked engine.

“For fuck's sake!”

The bus wouldn't start. My father smacked the steering wheel in frustration.

“Jesus Christ!”

He jumped from the van into the desert heat and began to have a near epileptic fit, his huge blue eyes growing larger and larger the more his anger mounted. Each word, perfectly enunciated in a fine English accent, exploded from his mouth.

“God…damn…mother…fucking…piece…of…
shit
!”

He hopped around the VW, kicking it and screaming, his longish blond hair bouncing up and down on his shoulders. His unbuttoned shirt flew out behind him. His white belly reflected the sun. Sweat popped from his face, and his usually flushed checks grew scarlet.

“Fucking…heap…of…fucking…
crap
!”

My mother sat in the front seat, completely silent, her face tense, her full lips set. We would come to know that posture well. Kathy and I kept quiet too, waiting for my father's eruption to subside. There was nothing else to do. After a while, he gave up kicking the VW and squatted glumly in the sand.

We waited in the desert for what seemed like an eternity. In the sweltering heat, the VW grew so hot, it sizzled to the touch. Then, suddenly, two shapes—bathed in intense sunlight—moved toward us from a car that just seemed to appear.

“Need some help?” one asked.

When we were chugging hopefully along again, Daddy told Kathy and me that the men who had gotten our car started were guardian angels of the desert, waiting under the scorching sun to help people like us. “The Mechanic Angels,” he called them.

The VW averaged two breakdowns a state. On highways, on small country roads. Not that my sister and I minded. We were having a
great time watching the country go by, eating diner pancakes in the early morning, listening to trucks hurl through the night when we pulled off the road to sleep.

Finally, tenacious to the end, the VW willed itself across the New Jersey state line and into the tiny town of Glen Gardner. It sputtered past the gas station and local bar, past the general store, down a small winding road that led over an old bridge and into the gravel patch at one side of a shadowy barn. My dad cut the headlights. We were home.