How to Cook Your Daughter Page 3

  Kathy and I spent what was left of the summer of 1971 exploring the fields, picking black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s lace, running over the little bridge, jumping into the deeper parts of a stream; that was our greatest joy. We played mermaids and lounged on the rocks. We tried to fish with our hands and trekked up the river, jumping from stone to stone and discovering interesting mosses and funny bugs.

  And at night, when we were exhausted and Daddy hadn’t gone to New York to work, he would create the most incredible bedtime stories.

  “All right girls, what will it be tonight?” he would ask.

  “The Adventures of Sergeant Teddy!” I’d yell.

  “Elizabeth Big Foot!” Kathy would scream.

  “No, Five Foot Six, Five Foot Six!” Kathy and I would finally agree.

  We both liked The Adventures of Sergeant Teddy, the sadistic sheriff of the toy room who tied up the Barbies and jailed the other teddy bears. We loved the stories about Elizabeth Big Foot—a young girl with an enormous foot that always got stuck in the bus. But Five Foot Six was our favorite. Five Foot Six was an eight-year-old boy who got his name from his unusual height. His parents treated him terribly. At dinner, they tied each strand of his spaghetti together and made him slurp it all at once. They tricked him into jumping into the swimming pool that they’d frozen solid. Or they blindfold him and told him they were taking him somewhere special for his birthday; instead, they made him sit for three hours in the car parked in the garage.

  “Are we there yet, Dad? Are we there yet?” he’d ask, over and over again.

  “Not yet, Five Foot Six,” his father (my father) would answer.

  They were dark, dark stories—modern-day Grimm’s fairy tales. But Kathy and I loved them. We’d roll around our beds giggling and laughing at every word until my father’s voice gave out.

  For much of that first summer, Kathy and I felt as though we be-longed in that house. Life seemed quieter there than it had in Los Angeles. And no, the house didn’t shake. But then came fall—and school. That was where I first noticed how different we were, where I realized that the Hendras stood out like graffiti scribbled over a billboard ad for Wonder Bread.

  Lebanon Township School (or Lebanon Township Jail, as it came to be called by those sentenced to attend class there) was a long, white, one-story building with a grassy playground. Inside it had been painted Board of Education green, and in each room—or, at least it seemed like each room—a portrait of President Richard Nixon looked down upon us. I think Spiro Agnew was there too—at least in spirit.

  From the first day my mother dropped Kathy and me off, I couldn’t escape how odd we were. The other mothers wore neat Carol Brady haircuts, pink lipstick, and polyester pant suits. My mother had long, straight hair and a makeup-free face and wore a T-shirt and jeans. Worse was that her British accent stood out, and she didn’t drive a station wagon. I sensed I was in for trouble.

  “Have a good time.” Mom kissed me good-bye. I didn’t want to let her go.

  I trudged into my new classroom, never so aware of my shaggy white-blond hair, crossed right eye, and pigeon-toed feet. At the door was my teacher, Miss Mole. That wasn’t her name, of course, but it should’ve been, given the enormous black mole she had on her chin. It had a long hair growing from it, even blacker than the mole itself. And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Its hideousness fascinated me. Did Miss Mole know it was there? I wondered. Didn’t she have a mirror? Come on, pull it out! I watched it sway gently as she ordered us to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.

  At noon, the bell rang, and we grabbed our lunch boxes and filed into the cafeteria. Except I didn’t have a lunch box, the most stylish fashion accessory for the elementary school student of 1971. I had nothing that bore the logo of Bonanza. No aluminum relief of Hoss or Little Joe, ever-so-slightly raised and painted on the front of the box. Not even The Jetsons! Just a crumpled brown paper bag from under our sink. Even before the days of community recycling, my parents were bag conservationists. I sat down at one of the tables. Some kids next to me were talking about one of the teachers.

  “You know, Mr. Reposo, at wood shop, he ties you up in the closet if you’re bad.”

  “I heard he once got a saw and cut a kid’s finger off.”

  “No, he didn’t cut it off. He grabbed a drill and just drilled a hole right through it.”

  I hoped that first graders didn’t have to take wood shop.

  I pulled my cheese sandwich from the bag. My mom’s homemade bread came out in strange shapes with big holes in it. The thick-cut wedges of English cheddar cheese my dad brought back from New York fell through them and onto the table as I tried to take my first bite. I glanced at the kids around me; their bread was pure white, every slice exactly the same. And no holes! Their cheese was sliced thin, perfectly square, bright orange, and soft. Their carrots were sliced, peeled, and packed in the plastic wrap my parents refused to buy. They even had paper napkins—forbidden in our house. “Every napkin is a tree, Jessie,” my father had told me. But at that moment, I didn’t care about trees or preservatives. I just wanted a lunch that looked like everyone else’s. I wanted my mother to wear a polyester-pants suit. I wanted even a sliver of plastic wrap.

  Pouting, I gathered what was left of my lunch and threw it in one of the huge green trash cans that rimmed the cafeteria. I trailed out to the playground, which was crammed with shouting kids, and sought refuge behind the swing set.

  “Hey, little girl! Stay in the playground! Do not go out of the marked playground area. Got it?” Who was this girl with the bright yellow band across her chest and waist?

  “Okay.”

  I turned and fled into the crowd, making myself small on one of the benches. A kid my own age sat next to me.

  “Did that safety yell at you?” she asked.

  “A what?”

  “A safety. They’re just big kids that get to boss us around on the yard.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  The bell rang, and we headed back to Miss Mole.

  That night at dinner, Kathy and I told my parents about school. Daddy became livid when he learned that we were saying the Pledge of Allegiance.

  “You girls are not even American for fuck’s sake. (Actually, I was, but Kathy had been born in England). I don’t want my children pledging allegiance to any flag, especially not the American one,” he told us. “I don’t want you girls involved in any of that nationalistic crap. What a fucking country!”

  He would write a note to the principal of Lebanon Township School, he promised, insisting that Kathy and I not say the pledge. All I could think of was Miss Mole telling the class to stand up, hands over hearts, her mole hair waving as she spoke. “Everybody except Jessica Hendra.” I imagined her sharp voice as she said my name, her scowl, and the looks on the other kids’ faces as they stared at the commie hunched over her desk. “We knew by her lunch she was weird,” they’d whisper.

  But Daddy was even more outraged about the safety who kept me away from the swing set. “Hitler Youth,” he called her, not that Kathy and I had any idea what a Hitler Youth was.

  “Was this girl giving you a Sieg Heil?” he asked me.

  Thankfully, by the next morning, my father had forgotten about the note and protesting against the safety. He was busy getting ready to go to New York. There was more and more work for him at the National Lampoon.

  My mother would shuttle him to the commuter bus that left from Clinton (about fifteen minutes from our house) and went into the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Many evenings, Kathy and I would go into Clinton with Mom to pick up Daddy. Sometimes, he would have spent the night—or even a few nights—in New York, and we always looked forward to seeing him again. Often, he would bring little goodies back from the city. I remember once he brought back some caviar and black truffles he had shoplifted from Bloomingdale’s. Stealing from the “big stores” was “a moral imperative,” he told me, flashing his loot proudly. “But never steal
anything from a mom-and-pop store, okay, Jessie?” Of course I said yes, but I didn’t understand at all. I didn’t know what “imperative” meant, but I knew that stealing was wrong. Was my father a no-good thief or a modern-day Robin Hood?

  Then one night Daddy emerged from the bus with his head wrapped in an enormous white bandage streaked with red where the blood seeped through. He looked like a bleeding Mummy, and Kathy and I were horrified. Later that night he told us the story of what had happened, and I was convinced he was Robin Hood.

  2.

  THE BROWNIES

  HE WAS WALKING WITH A FRIEND DOWN IN SOHO LATE the night before when a car came speeding down the street and almost hit them. He yelled at the driver to slow down, and the driver did more than that. He stopped, backed up, and jumped out of the car, pulling a gun on my dad. Daddy thought that was it, that the man was going to shoot him right then and there in the face. But then the man heard a police siren coming toward them, and, instead of firing, he hit my dad over the head with the pistol and sped off.

  I was thrilled and frightened by my father’s bravado. I had seen him yell at a good many cars, and I believed his story. I would have believed anything he told me. I learned the truth only recently. My dad had, in fact, been pistol-whipped, but in a barroom brawl. It turns out he was defending a woman he was having an affair with at the time, something that would have been hard to explain to your six-year-old daughter, let alone to your wife. Regardless, my mother rarely questioned him about his often erratic behavior or about the increasing frequency with which he stayed in the city. Before cell phones and answering machines, it was harder to track people down. You could just disappear—and my father often did.

  After Daddy’s bloody return from New York, I became even more anxious about him going there. I worried he would yell at a car again and that, this time, he would get shot, hurt, or run over. That we would go to Clinton to pick him up from the bus, and he would come down the steps covered from head to toe with bandages oozing blood. Or worse, that he would not be on the bus at all—that he would be lying dead along side some New York street curb.

  The days he stayed home in New Jersey to write were always better. On those days, I could keep track of him. I could relax and not worry so much while I played with our neighbor, Becky Bradford. We’d play dress ups, go in the stream, or just run around outside. Neither Kathy nor I were much for dolls, especially not Barbies, at least not around our house. Playing with Barbies meant enduring jabs by my father, who found the dolls absurd. As he put it, “Only in America would they make a doll for kids with tits like that.”

  If we wanted to play dolls, we would walk up the long gravel driveway to Becky’s. Her mother, Connie, made us peanut-butter-and-grape-jelly sandwiches on spongy white bread while she inhaled Parliaments. Like most everyone but my mother, she wore the standard Brady haircut and pants suit of the normal mom. Best of all, she thought Barbies were cute. I could play for hours up at their house, reveling in Wonder Bread, Fresca, Barbies, and maybe even an episode of Mighty Mouse. The Bradford house was my portal to suburban America. I felt slightly guilty when I returned from a day at Becky’s—as if I had been off doing something illicit. I wondered: Could my parents smell the Hamburger Helper on my breath?

  I never stopped feeling awkward and out of place at Lebanon Township School. But there seemed one way to belong.

  I had seen them sitting outside the A&P supermarket in Clinton. They always wore their hair in little bows or pig tails, and they dressed in crisp, green dresses; little caps; white knee socks; and brown shoes. The cookies came in neat packages laid out on the tables in front of them. And next to the boxes were pictures of the girls sitting around a campfire, putting up canvas tents, or holding the hands of grateful-looking old ladies. I wanted to be one of those girls. I wanted to look official and perky and go camping and sing songs. I wanted to sit outside of the A&P on Saturday mornings with my friends, giggling and selling cookies.

  But I found out from the girls in my class that you couldn’t just become a Girl Scout. You had to earn that green uniform. You had to make it through the Brownies.

  I decided not to tell Daddy about joining the local Brownie troop. If he thought the safeties at school were Nazis…well, I had a feeling that he wouldn’t approve of the uniformed Brownies. It was always easier to tell my mother about such matters. She said if I wanted to go to the next troop meeting, that was fine.

  I would go to the first meeting without the official brown uniform, which I would get sometime before the second meeting. I couldn’t wait—an official Brownie. The first step toward becoming a full-fledged Girl Scout—the campfires, the singing, the Saturday-morning cookie sales. Nirvana!

  The troop met after school, and on the day I went, the Brownies were making plastic place mats for the cookout—cookout!—they were having in a few weeks. The mats were made by weaving rows of plastic strips, each a different color, into a large rectangle. I was invited to sit on the floor as part of the Brownies’ circle and join in, my first semi-official act as a troop member. It wasn’t selling cookies or sitting around a campfire. But that would come soon enough. And I’d have this cool placemat…this rainbow of a placemat…this awful, impossible-to-make placemat! Ugh! The plastic strips kept slipping and fell out of order. And when I pulled them tight, they’d break. My mat wasn’t even close to the rectangular beauty on display by the troop leader. It was a lumpy mess! Am I really Girl Scout material after all? I wondered. Next to me, a girl with a pixie haircut and a button nose wove a perfect mat: smooth, not too tight, and flat as a pancake. She’d be ready for the cookout.

  Pixie Girl must’ve felt me watching her because she turned a second later and looked down at the mass of twisted, snapped plastic strips on my lap.

  “You’re doing it all wrong,” she said. It was really more of a whine. And then, “Your mat looks really dumb.”

  Dumb? This from a uniformed Brownie.

  “Well….” I mumbled. What should I say? I knew it had to be good. Then, it came to me: “You’re a stupid asshole!”

  The words flew from my mouth. Loud. Bold. Proud! They echoed through the room, and every hand stopped weaving. Plastic hung suspended in the air. Every Brownie froze. After a moment, Pixie Girl broke the silence.

  “That girl called me a bad word. A really bad word!”

  She pointed at me as she hollered, but she could’ve saved her breath. There wasn’t a single person in that room, including the troop leader herself, who had missed the word “asshole” coming from the mouth of the struggling new recruit. I looked down at the green tiles of the floor, my face burning. What would they do to me? I was reminded of a few days earlier, Sunday, when my dad had been out on the lawn behind the house trying to fix the lawnmower. He had been cursing at the top of his lungs, calling the mower “a fucking lump of shit” and “a goddamn son of a bitch”—terms once reserved for the laboring VW bus. Suddenly, a man’s voice, carried by the wind and through the trees near Connie and Doug Bradford’s house: “Watch your stinking mouth, Hendra, or I’ll have you arrested!”

  Arrested? Is that what was going to happen? They’ll haul me away and lock me in jail? Or would they just wash my mouth out with soap like I saw Connie do to Becky’s brother Jeremy when he called her a “Fat Cootie?” Becky and I had peeked through the crack of the bathroom door and watched Connie pry open Jeremy’s mouth and wedge half a bar of Ivory Soap between his jaws. It foamed as he gagged and spat. Connie added a bit of water and scrubbed her hand around his mouth. Finally she let him go and sent him to his room in tears. Which was worse: prison or Ivory Soap?

  The troop leader made her way toward me, her pink face red, her lips trembling. Only her hair, frozen by hairspray, remained calm.

  “Jessica Hendra, you will stand up and walk from this room immediately!” I did as I was told and abandoned my plastic mat then and there. “Go and wait outside for your mother to pick you up. You are not to come back,” she told me.

 
And then, the worst words of all: “You will never be a Brownie!” In that one moment, the dreams of the cookouts, the cookies, and the campfires were over.

  Banished…a punishment worse than soap or jail. A life without the uniform I so desperately wanted. I left the troop meeting disgraced—a Girl Scouts of America juvenile delinquent. Outside, I waited for Mom. The troop leader occasionally peeked out the window to make sure I remained planted on the bench, but I didn’t have the energy to make any more trouble.

  Finally, my mother arrived. She wore a cardigan over my favorite of her T-shirts, this one from the Pink Pussy Cat Boutique. It had a sly-looking cat on it and words that, just the other day, I had struggled to read: “Stroke Me and I’ll Purr.” Of course I didn’t know that the Pink Pussy Cat Boutique was an infamous sex shop in the West Village. I just thought the cat was cute.

  When I saw her, I started crying.

  “What happened, Jessie?”

  I told her the whole story, about the deformed plastic mats, about the pixie-haircut fiend, about the life sentence handed down by the troop leader.

  “Oh well,” she consoled. “Maybe they’ll forget about it and let you back in.”

  But I knew that would never happen. We walked over to the classroom where Kathy remained in a Brownies meeting with a slightly older troop. I looked through the window. She was still in the weaving circle, and I could tell things had gone more smoothly for her. But she didn’t look thrilled. She looked stoic, her glasses balanced on her nose, her brown hair hung straight and flat on her shoulders, her pudgy face tensed as she listened to the parting words of her troop leader.