Roxy’s Story

“You see the door?” my father asked, pointing his thick right forefinger at the entrance
of our East Side town house in New York City. “Pack your things and get out. Go on,
get out,” he added, poking his finger in the air repeatedly, as if he were trying
to hit the invisible button that would make me disappear.

Mama stood next to him looking even more terrified than I did, her beautiful cameo
face shattering beneath the storm of his rage. She was always easier to read than
I was. I never showed my father fear, cowered, or retreated, which only made him angrier.
In fact, my defiance usually grew stronger as the volume and intensity of his anger
boiled over like hot milk. There was simply no middle ground for either of us to occupy,
no well of compromise from which either of us could draw a cup of calmness. Ironically,
I was too much like him.

“You think I won’t?” I fired back.

“No. I think you had better,” he replied with a level of determination I had never
seen him reach. There was no hesitation in his eyes and nothing that
suggested an empty threat. This time, there was no doubt that he meant what he had
said and how he had said it.

I glanced at Mama again. She looked far more surprised at his firmness than I had
ever seen her look. She confirmed his determination for me. She could see that Papa
wasn’t simply having one of his spontaneous temper tantrums. Her eyes were wide open
now, her lips trembling. In fact, her whole face looked as if it was vibrating as
she paled. She even stepped away from him. I had no doubt that throughout their twenty
years of marriage, she had never confronted or witnessed such fury in him and had
no idea what else he might do. We had been circling each other like two martial-arts
warriors for months lately. This confrontation was inevitable.

“Yes, sir,” I said, then clicked my black leather shoe boot heels together and saluted
him. The proper way to salute was one of the first things he had taught me when I
was a little girl. After he taught that to me, emphasizing how smart and snappy it
had to be, with my palm to the left, my wrist straight, and my thumb and fingers extended
and joined, I saluted him every time I saw him. In the beginning, even he was satisfied,
and Mama thought it was cute, but after a while, he saw that I was really mocking
the salute, doing it so often, practically every time he looked at me, and he began
to be annoyed by it and eventually forbade me to do it.

Now whenever I did it, especially with my heels clicking, it was as though I had set
off a firecracker in
his brain. At the moment, the veins in his neck pressed boldly against his skin. Pea-size
patches of white at the corners of his lips began to spread like a rash. He looked
as if he had swollen into some horrid ogre who could heave me and all of the furniture
out the window.

My father wasn’t a terribly big man. He was a little more than six feet tall and had
broad shoulders, but he didn’t look like a weight lifter or a lumberjack. Having been
brought up in a military family, he had a cadet’s perfect posture, so he always seemed
solid and battle-ready, even though he had rejected the military life and had gone
into investment management and financing.

His father was General Thornton Wilcox, who was once considered a top candidate to
command NATO. The gilt-framed two-by-four picture of my grandfather in full dress
uniform with all of his medals glittering hung in our entryway hall and loomed over
us the way the picture of a saint might hover in the home of a religious family. The
light positioned above it seemed to highlight the dissatisfaction I had no trouble
imagining in his face. My father’s older brother, Orman, had followed in his father’s
footsteps, but not
mon père
.

Even though no one came right out and said it, I knew that in my grandfather’s mind,
my father was a great disappointment. I knew that both my grandfather and my uncle
ridiculed my father’s decision, treating him as if he were somehow weaker than they
were, and in a family where affection and emotion were considered weakness to start
with, his father and brother had little trouble thinking of him as an outsider.

I never saw him or my mother shed any tears at how his father and his brother treated
him, but there was no question about where he stood in their eyes. Even though no
one clearly had said, “You’re not one of us; you’re no Wilcox,” the words hung in
the air between them like some foul odor whenever they had occasion to meet, which
was happening less and less, anyway.

So I guess that pointing at the front door and telling me I was no longer part of
our family wasn’t all that big an emotional leap for my father. His family had all
but done the same to him. That old expression,
It takes one to know one
, probably fit him, but I’m not laying all the blame at his feet. I’m not looking
for some psychological rationalization or a comfortable excuse for what I had done
and what was now happening.

No, I’m not going to deny being the top choice to model for a problem-child poster.
Mon père
had threatened to disown me many times and had suggested more than once that I be
sent to one of those isolated behavior camps to experience tough love, but I really
didn’t want to believe that he would actually reach the point where he would firmly
and permanently want me out of his life the way he obviously did at this moment.

I looked at Mama again to see if she would interfere and rescue me. She appeared to
be wilting quickly in the wake of my father’s overwhelming rage. As if she were trying
to keep her body from breaking apart, she wrapped her arms tightly around herself.
She
looked like someone in a straitjacket. No, there was no sign of my getting any help
there. This time, she wasn’t going to step between us as she had many times previously.
I knew that especially lately, she was coming to believe that I was irretrievable,
too.

No matter what the reason, opposing my father was one of the most difficult things
for her to do. She was about as devoted to him as any woman could be devoted to her
husband. From overhearing conversations between her and some of her friends, I knew
that she was constantly accused of having no mind of her own and permitting my father
to run her life. But I also knew that my father had convinced her that I could be
a devastatingly bad influence on my little sister, Emmie, his and Mama’s golden child,
their
enfant parfaite
, and that possibility also caused her to stand back.

They weren’t even supposed to have Emmie. After my difficult birth, Mama’s doctor
had advised her not to get pregnant again. I didn’t know all of the medical reasons,
but I did know that her getting pregnant, even nine years after my birth, was a dangerous
thing for her to do. When I heard she was pregnant, my first thought was that my father
wanted another child because he was so disappointed in me. He wanted this child so
much that he was willing to risk my mother’s life. If I had any doubts about how low
I stood in his list of priorities, Mama’s pregnancy confirmed it. Every time he closed
his eyes in my presence, I suspected that he was wishing I had never been born.

“Norton,
s’il vous plaît
,” Mama said softly. That
was the extent of her resistance that day. She came from a family in France where
men were treated like kings. That’s where the Napoleonic Code established the supremacy
of the husband when it came to his wife and children.

“No!” he screamed at her. “No more. I want her out of my sight.”

His shout bounced off the walls and rattled my spine, but I didn’t show it.

“No problem,” I said. “Relax. The feeling’s mutual,” I added as coolly and calmly
as I could, and went to pack my things, sucking in my fear and shock. As I walked
by him, I thought I could actually feel the heat in the air.

When I was honest with myself, I admitted that I had always expected this day would
come. Secretly, I had planned for it, hoarding money, considering what I would take
and what I wouldn’t and where I would go first. My parents didn’t know, but I had
recently been seeing a college boy who had his own apartment in the Bronx. He was
always trying to get me to stay overnight, and I had done so once, lying about sleeping
over at a girlfriend’s home. Now maybe I would stay for quite a few nights.

As I packed, I heard them arguing downstairs. Comments such as “You remember we were
told that tough love was our only hope” and “Let her see what it’s like trying to
survive out there” floated up the stairs to my room. I could imagine my mother wringing
her hands as she chanted, “
Mon Dieu, mon Dieu
.” That wouldn’t impress my father. Calling for God’s
help was something a soldier did in battle, and surely my father was thinking that
this battle was over. Not that his family was very religious, anyway. To me, it seemed
that they thought of churches the same way they thought of the officers’ club, just
another place you visited from time to time to remind yourself that you were special.

My sister, Emmie, heard nothing of this argument. She was fast asleep in her bedroom,
snug under her comforter, her teddy bear dressed in a soldier’s uniform beside her,
its glass button eyes catching bits of light seeping through the curtains. Emmie was
nearly nine years old and admittedly very bright for her age. Unlike me, she had a
warm, very outgoing personality. She was easy to love. I was more like a seamless
walnut, impossible to crack or get into. You had to smash me to peel off my hard shell.
I trusted no one and believed that everyone was selfish like me. Even nuns were doing
what they were doing solely to get themselves into heaven.

It seemed to me that my father had been complaining about me from day one, not that
I could remember day one. But he often made reference to my infant days, describing
how difficult and stubborn I could be. It was safe to say that my father rarely, if
ever, complimented me about anything. It was as if he thought that one compliment
would open a fortress, and I would rush through with all of my bad behavior. Although
I wasn’t particularly looking for excuses, I suppose a good therapist would say that
mon père
was at least partly responsible for how I had turned
out. My father might not have chosen an army career for himself, but he certainly
ran our home and family as if we were a military unit. Sometimes I thought he wasn’t
my father; he was just someone in charge, someone assigned guard duty.

I wasn’t exactly Miss Popularity at my school, either, but I was close enough with
some of the other girls to hear about how their fathers treated them, fawned over
them, and, most important, made excuses for any of their failings. Some of the girls
enjoyed playing their fathers for sympathy and bragged about how easy it was for them
to get “Daddy” to do anything for them or let them do anything. Even the girls who
came from very conservative and religious homes seemed to have more freedom and longer
leashes than I had, not that I ever paid much attention to my leash.