How to Cook Your Daughter (5 page)

The morning we left L.A., I had wondered what the cold was like, and we got to know each other that first winter in New Jersey. Being able to play in the snow or go skating after school made up, in part, for the painfully long hours at Lebanon Township Jail. Connie and Doug Bradford proved great neighbors and helped my mother dig the VW out of a drift when my father was in New York. They loaned us candles when the power went out. Our stone house had a rickety furnace and radiators that spent more time clanging and banging than warming the room, so we passed our time inside huddled by the fireplace in the living room. Going upstairs to bed proved agonizing after sitting by the fire. Kathy and I would climb into our beds and scream as we slipped beneath the ice cold covers. Then we'd dance lying down, if only to get our blood going and the sheets a bit warmer.

But when we were outside skating on the nearby pond or hurtling down frozen driveways on a sled, the numbing cold seemed inconsequential. Sometimes my father would come sledding with us. He was fearless, like that boy on the trike years before, ramming himself into the brick wall over and over and over again. My father plummeted down the steepest hill at top speed with Kathy and me taking turns sitting between his legs as he steered. We would shriek as we slid faster and faster, and Daddy would scream along with us. He took us skating and always made us wait on the frosty bank of the pond while he went out on the ice to test its safety. Before he left, he tucked his scarf into
the multicolored sweater my grandma Georgina had knitted him from old bits of wool. It was knobby and oversized and smelled of cigar smoke—much like my father himself. But he had lost quite a lot of weight since we lived in L.A. and looked leaner and stronger that winter. He'd skate to the edge of the ice, his eyes sharp and clear, his cheeks bright with cold, and as I watched him glide to the center, my heart grew as still as I sat, as if worrying with me that the ice might not be thick enough. That it would crack beneath him. That he would be swept into the dark water. That the ice—like the cars in the city, like
Heroin
—might take away Daddy. But then I'd smile as he came skimming back to us, yelling that it was safe and then holding us up until we got our skater's legs.

On the afternoon that we went looking for our tree, the day had turned gray and damp, with the sort of dim sunlight that promised snow by nightfall. Kathy and I pulled our empty sled and followed my mom and dad, who carried a large, sharp spade. We headed about a quarter of a mile down the road to the icy driveway of Hall's Christmas Tree Farm. There, we knocked on the door of the farmhouse. Mrs. Hall answered, and the smell of cinnamon and hot chocolate wafted onto the porch.
Could it be?
I couldn't stop myself from wondering:
That's Santa's wife. Mrs. Claus. It
had
to be!
She smiled slightly at the sight of the sled and the spade, and when she heard my parents' request, she offered us the use of her handy chainsaw. No thank you, my father said, but might we have a garbage bag to wrap the roots in? Even if we were forbidden to
buy
garbage bags, we could, in good conscience, beg one for this cause. Mrs. Hall went into a kitchen drawer and handed my father the bag. Go ahead and take any tree, she told us. Free of charge.

“That's for being neighbors!” she said, handing Kathy and me each
a gingerbread cookie, which made me
certain
she must be Santa's wife. After all, who else would reward
us
for being their neighbors?

We tramped up the hill and into the woods, in search of the perfect tree. The forest was stunning. Acres and acres of green pines in all shapes, heights and varieties. Snow blanketed their boughs as they swayed gently in the wind. We crunched from tree to tree, assessing the width and general beauty of each, and, of course, its height. That could be a problem in a house with low ceilings. I wanted a wide, furry tree. Kathy wanted something more stately. So Daddy helped us choose, going from this one to that, arguing merits and defects, imbuing each tree with a separate personality.

“This one is a real crazy,” he'd say. “Look at those branches flying all over the place. Now here's more of the quiet type.” He'd move on. “Reads Plato….”

After a while, all of us were getting so cold that a decision had to be made. Kathy and I compromised: We'd take a Norwegian pine that was full but rather squat. It seemed, as my father put it, “jolly.” We hopped and stamped our feet to keep warm as my dad worked up a sweat digging…and digging…and digging through the frozen ground with his spade. After more than an hour and a flurry of curses that I hoped Mrs. Claus couldn't hear, Daddy finally hefted the tree out of the earth, roots intact. My mom helped hoist it onto a sled that was far too short for the tree. Then my parents wrapped the garbage bag around the roots, and Daddy tied our tree to the sled with some twine he had stuffed in his pocket.

The sled proved too heavy for Kathy and me. So my dad and mom began pushing from behind, trying to do as little damage to the tree as possible. We made the journey back toward Mrs. Hall's house and then down her driveway. As we trudged along the road home, a station
wagon appeared behind us, a cut tree strapped to its top. As it passed, the kids in the back looked through the window at our sled and dug-up pine. They seemed puzzled, but I was proud. I thought about how we would replant the tree after Christmas, how we had
saved
it. I knew it was grateful.

We brought the sled to the side of the house and opened the door as wide as we could. Kathy, my mom, and I cleared a spot in the corner of the living room. Then we helped my father fill a deep pan with dirt. He stood the tree in it and buried its roots. It was up to Kathy and me to water it, which we did diligently. Several days after Christmas, we helped my father replant the tree outside our house. We looked for the softest spot of earth, and found one that wasn't frozen solid, under the eaves of the old barn. There, it took root again.

Besides the Christmas posters my dad helped create, the December issue of the
Lampoon
carried a piece that, even at six and a half, made me curious about the complicated relationship my father had with the Catholic Church. It was a satire of the life of Jesus, but this time, the Messiah was a woman. The piece was called “Jessica Christ by FR. Tony Hendra,” and Daddy took me aside to show it to me. “I thought you might like it, treasure, seeing that your name was in it,” he said. The piece was done in simple comic book form, with large print and pictures of Jessica Christ doing good deeds. But Jessica wore robes with plunging neck lines, not to mention a Marilyn Monroe pinup-style bathing suit when she walked on water. The language was simple, and I could read some of it. But like most of my father's humor, the jokes were lost on me.

“‘Take eat,' Jessica said, ‘for this is My body.”

“‘Hubbba Hubbba,' said the apostles.”

The last picture showed Jessica nailed to the cross, her huge breasts exposed. Only a skimpy loin cloth dangled from her curvy hips. It terrified me. I told my daddy I wished he had used someone else's name instead. “Don't be silly,” he said. But I had seen the small, devotional, black, wooden cross with a silver figure of Christ, the cross that my father kept carefully stowed in one of the drawers of his desk in his office. Not yet seven, I could just sense how Jessica Christ and the lovingly preserved silver figure contradicted each other. What I couldn't yet comprehend was how the viciousness with which my father went after religion seemed the flip side of the love that he had once felt for it. His venom made me nervous. It was, and remains, a rebellion beyond my depth.

I was left completely confused about Christianity. My dad told me that they had Kathy and me baptized “just in case.”
In case of what?
When I asked him about the Easter Bunny, he told me it was “the risen Christ Vampire who comes to suck the blood of little children.” Still, he would later take us to Midnight Mass in the city and make a point of reciting the responses in very loud Latin—over the English of the rest of the congregation. Why? Because, he explained, “real Catholics speak Latin.”

I had a superstitious notion that my father's decision to use my name in his parody might bring the wrath of God upon me. And my father did little to allay my fears. In fact, he confirmed them just a few weeks later. When Daddy told me the
Lampoon
had a little recording job for me, I was ecstatic. I would have a line on a record they were putting together called
Radio Dinner
. Now I would finally have a chance to make $50, just as Kathy had done with her illustrated “How to Cook Your Father.”

I also got a day off from school. Kathy, my mom, and I were to
meet Daddy at the recording studio in the city. Instead of risking the trip in the VW—which seemed beyond terminal, its clutch having given out on the steepest hill in the neighborhood—Mom drove our “new” International Scout into Manhattan. The Scout, which Kathy and I dubbed “Flossie,” had no back seats. Instead, we sat on narrow metal side-benches. Forget seatbelts; we clutched handrails that suspended from the Scout's ceiling. Too late, a neighbor told my parents what the used car dealer hadn't—that Flossie had been run into the ground by the local mailman. Jolting through the Midtown Tunnel, we met up with city traffic and discovered for ourselves what the neighbor meant. Flossie was not at her best in traffic. Like the VW van, she had a habit of stalling, and too often we sat frozen when red lights turned green. The honking gave me a headache.

Still, I was full of excitement when we finally walked out of the elevator and into the recording studio. Assorted members of the
Lampoon
were waiting for us, including Michael O'Donoghue, then one of my father's closest friends. The guys showed me around the sound booth, the colossal earphones, the warren of levers and buttons that controlled the volume, the mike that needed to be adjusted to accommodate my four-foot height. When the engineer said they were ready for me, I suddenly got shaky. My father had to feed me my line:

“What can you expect from a God who crucified his own son?”

I practiced it a few times with him, working to say it exactly on his hand signal. On the first take, I got the line wrong. On the second, I said it too fast. Finally, after a few more tries, I nailed it.

“That was perfect!” Daddy said, taking the headphones off my small, bright-red ears. I was elated. We stepped from the booth, and I held his hand as we stood with Michael, my mother, and Kathy. The engineer played back the cut. I was thrilled to listen to myself
coming through the speakers, but after he heard it, my father looked down at me.

“Did you know you are going to hell for what you just said, Jessie?”

My stomach turned. I hadn't gone to church more than a handful of times, but I had heard all about hell from my dad—the burning bodies, the devil, and the red-hot pokers stuck in your eyes for ever and ever. Jessica Christ had worried me. But now, I had said something bad about God. My worst fears were coming true, and it was my own fault. “But you told me to say that, Daddy!” I blurted. “You told me to say that!”

“It doesn't matter,” he said calmly. “You are still going to hell. In fact, Jessie, now we are
both
going to hell.”

“But Daddy, what if I say I'm sorry?” I was desperate.

“It's too late for that,” he said. “God listens to records.”

Maybe everyone in the room laughed. All I remember is that no one reassured me that I was not, in fact, destined for eternal damnation. It might not have made much of an impression if they had. I always believed my father.

I got my $50 and went off to spend it in wonderland—the gigantic FAO Schwartz on Fifth Avenue. But I felt sick as I looked at the doll house furniture, stuffed animals, toy cars, and roller skates. Yes, they could be mine. But all I could think about was what awaited me. Hell.

God listens to records. And there was nothing I could do about it.

A few months later, my father lay naked on the ice of the frozen riverbed outside our house, curled in a fetal position. Above him, my mom brandished a blood-specked baseball bat. He was freezing to death. He had to be. After all, it must have been close to zero outside. And he lay there shivering, in a pool of blood—until the
Lampoon's
art director told him he could get up. Kathy and I watched from the shore.

Christmas had passed, and whatever thoughts I had of going to hell had abated, but my fears for my father remained. He still traveled into the city often, and when he might return never seemed certain. And so I was glad when he began bringing his work home with him—no matter how bizarre it turned out to be. At that time, the
Lampoon
had no budget for its photo spreads. Open the magazine, and you would see the editors modeling T-shirts or a naked Michael O'Donoghue as “Mr. Yum-Yum Cosmo, cutie of the month” in a
Cosmopolitan
parody. So when my dad decided to parody a burly hunter clubbing a baby seal for the
Lampoon
's “Men” issue, he offered to shoot it in our backyard. Why not stage the shoot on the frozen river? And why not feature my mom as the club-wielding hunter? And have Daddy curl up on the ice naked, with Mom standing over him, brandishing a bat? And why not let Kathy and me watch? Of course we knew nothing about what the shoot would entail. No one had told us Daddy would be naked and lying in fake blood. Or that Mom would be pretending to kill him. All my parents had suggested was that Becky Bradford might not want to come to play that afternoon.

As Kathy and I stood by, my mother came down to the riverbank dressed in a long black skirt, boots, and a fur jacket courtesy of Anne Beatts, the issues editor. The
Lampoon
's art director, Michael Gross, had been setting up to take the pictures, and when he was ready, my father strode from the house in a robe and some old shoes. Michael handed my mother a worn baseball bat, and then poured bright red liquid, almost fluorescent, over a section of the river that had frozen solid. Then my mother took her position on the ice and hoisted the bat high over a shoulder. “Everything's ready,” Michael called out, and with that, my father stripped off his robe. Shivering and chattering, he flung himself, completely naked, on the ice and in the pool of blood.
Then he curled up at my mother's feet while she wielded the bat. Michael had to work quickly.