“You worry too much, Mother,” my mother would reply good-humoredly. “The children are just fine.”
I loved when my grandmother worried about us. “The children look pale,” she would say as soon as she’d arrived from New Jersey, a great wave of abundance sweeping through our house in her wake. Baskets of raspberries and lushly arranged grapes filled the countertops. Lemon cakes and exotic flavored ice creams came out after dinner. (So unlike my mother, who bought only apples, green bananas, and vanilla ice cream at the A&P, avoiding the more expensive shops.) My grandmother outfitted us for the season, too—stiff new shoes for Whitney, a new Lilly Pulitzer sundress for me—and replaced the astringent Dial soaps in the showers with her own creamy Dove brand, and we all laughed out loud in the evenings when my father shouted from the shower, “Gail, where’s my goddamn soap?”
My mother complained that my father’s compulsive collecting absorbed most of his earnings and Stroh Brewery Company dividends. “Your father’s spending is like a disease,” she would say. But her efforts to curb his spending only made him resentful.
I imagined something eating away at him from the inside, like a tapeworm or a tumor. I wondered if it was contagious, if we’d all caught it; perhaps it was only a matter of time before the scabs would appear, the lost limbs, or atrophied muscles. Soon would we all be in wheelchairs like Uncle Dan, who’d lost all his muscle control like that famous baseball player Lou Gehrig?
Only this disease seemed to travel a mysterious route; bypassing our tissues, it simply hijacked our feelings, our perceptions. A constant sense of anxiety quelled only by the distraction of intense excitement. What was worse, the condition seemed as incurable as my mother’s badgering was relentless, and sometimes I wondered if all that spending might, in fact, be my father’s attempt at remedy rather than the disease itself.
“Always save for a rainy day” was my mother’s oft-expressed motto. She sometimes called our private school to get extensions on the tuition deadlines, or notified the phone company that the payment would arrive late. My mother arranged for us to have the hand-me-downs from her friends’ children and, during the years when my father gave her no money for our vacations because he had spent everything on his collecting, we drove the five hours to my aunt’s house in Harbor Springs.
Though both my parents’ families were well off financially, the Robertsons’ handling of money was far more conservative than the Strohs’, as were their values. My mother had drawn from her inheritance to pay for college; my father had drawn from his to procure a fleet of Jaguars. From a distance, his largesse may have appealed to my mother, initially, but up close the two of them were like runaway trains passing in the night, my father’s reckless spending accelerating with time, even as my mother’s fears escalated proportionately.
After swimming at the club, while all the other children signed chits for hamburgers and Cobb salads, my mother usually took us home for peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and brought us back afterward.
“Why can’t you eat here?” our friends would ask and, feeling shamed, I lied and told them that we preferred the lunches our mother made.
I believed my friends at the club were more worthy than I was, and certainly luckier. They ordered club sandwiches and Cokes with a sense of abandon that I envied, while, on the occasions when I was permitted to order lunch, I enjoyed my hotdog and French fries—or my scoop of Stroh’s peppermint ice cream—with a guilty pleasure that bordered on the illicit.
If I questioned my mother’s policy, she reminded me, “The Carmichaels had to resign from the club, you know, because those kids ran up a bill so long, it arrived at their front door in a shoe box!”
My mother’s anxieties fueled my own, and as a preteen I shoplifted clothing and makeup from the local department stores. I even stole my first trainer bra. Part necessity, part sport, my thievery had begun in first grade, when I’d occasionally taken pencils and erasers from my classmates’ desks, and later at sleepaway camp, where I’d stolen a pair of Dr. Scholl’s from a neighboring cabin, only to return them later under a cloud of guilt.
My middle school friends and I would take turns distracting the sales girls while one of us slipped the desired items into a canvas tote bag, our hearts revved up on adrenaline. Somehow my mother never thought to question my burgeoning wardrobe, even after I was caught and she’d had to retrieve me from security at Hudson’s Department Store. Perhaps she was gratified, albeit unconsciously, by this demonstration of self-reliance.