Swallow

An excerpt from SEARCHING FOR SUZI
Release date November 15, 2009

When I was fourteen my father gave me the accumulation of his life’s wisdom: if you want to keep a man, learn to swallow.

This was several years after they had started having “slumber parties” with our next-door neighbors where they all wore matching pajamas. Some weekends we’d alternate and all sleep at the neighbor’s house, me alone in the guest bedroom and the four of them in the king-sized master bed, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice style.

The slumber parties were only the latest in a string of similar events. Like the way my father dressed my mother up in wooden heels and no bra and paraded her around the mall, following ten paces behind. Or our series of pretty college babysitters. Or the bachelors and newlywed couples that always seemed to come to dinner.

My mother was a pageant girl herself, always beautifully posed in those old black-and-white group shots of all the contestants in their 60’s coifs and A-line satin gowns. But my mother never won a pageant. Even in the photographs her eyes are shy, embarrassed by all the attention. The other girls cheated, she claimed. It was all a popularity contest. She would blame the hairdresser, the too-tight shoes, the fact she had been crying all night with nerves.

My father loved to tell stories about my mother’s loser, outcast boyfriends; he taunted her about her morning breath, stinky feet, beak nose, giraffe neck, her one slightly discolored tooth from an old root canal. As I approached puberty, I got it too: my budding breasts were mosquito bites, ironing boards. When guests were over he hung up my training bra with a note that said “feed me.”

Right about the time I discovered my father’s vast porn collection, my mother discovered Jesus and the slumber parties stopped. So my father’s affair began. Every evening for five years he ate dinner, showered, shaved, put on clean clothes and went “next door.” If we needed him in the evenings we’d have to call next door. If I wanted to spend quality time with him it had to be while he was shaving.

“She” became a loaded word. Fights were intense and unpredictable. I stopped bringing friends home. My mother destroyed gifts, gave away any clothing reminiscent of “her” or their slumber parties; I was endlessly grounded, chained to the house.

Then one night I was home alone. Fed up, I had a bottle of aspirin and a Capri Sun. I dumped out the pile of little white discs and counted: fifty-two.

I heard twenty aspirin would kill you, so I took twenty. Then I took the rest, very fast. I lay on the carpet and waited for the Angel of Death to come and carry me away, but after an hour I was still waiting. Poison was singing about every rose having its thorn. The death part must take a while, I decided, so I did what any fifteen-year-old would do: I snuck out.

I hurried to a party that I wasn’t allowed to attend—I was grounded, after all. But I was going to die soon, so what did it matter? I don’t remember the details of the party, and once there, the aspirin dissolving in my stomach seemed as surreal as the Cheetos or the vodka-grape soda mixture in my plastic cup. After an hour or so, I began to dread the severe punishment that was surely awaiting me at home when I was discovered missing.

I stumbled home, past the huge dark lumps of suburban houses and the sounds of sputtering sprinklers, and my mind vacillated between the excuse I would use to explain why I had gone to a forbidden party and the excuse I would use to explain why I was going to die. I was woozy. I imagined myself falling dramatically through my front door, on the verge of death, and my father taking me in his arms and weeping, No!

My father sat in his bathrobe in front of the TV, the couch already made up with blankets and pillows from previous weeks.

“Where have you been?” he said without looking at me. “You’re grounded for another month.”

Dying now seemed like a very bad idea. I ran upstairs to the bathroom and tried to puke. I watched the room spin, pleading, I made a mistake. I don’t want to die any more. I begged and bargained until sleep finally won and the next morning I woke up alive.

My parents found out about the whole ordeal three weeks later when the only friend I’d confided in told our high school principal, Father Frank Dimitri, “for my own protection.” I should have kept my mouth shut. My parents were waiting for me after school with torches lit, lynching rope ready. My father held photocopied sheets of my diary; my mother slowly explained how they would never be able to leave me alone in the house because I might clean out the medicine cabinet like some common druggie. That same day they packed my bag and drove me to Lutheran Hospital, checked me into the teen psychiatric ward, told the nurses that I was to have no visitors, and left me to watch the holiday lights go up, and then come down, outside my seventh-story window.

My parents split six months after I was released from the hospital—they couldn’t stand up to the scrutiny that followed a daughter’s suicide attempt. The precarious marriage was finally put out of its misery and my father moved out, leaving only a note on my bed saying I hadn’t been much of a daughter.

Even now I still think about his strange, almost prophetic advice: If you want to keep a man, learn to swallow. I’ve swallowed so much, Dad, I want to say. More than you ever told me I would have to.