At those moments when her worry overwhelmed her, my mother collected clothes from the street. As with backgammon, her compulsion became a kind of hobby. I’d come home from school to find piles of found clothes, laundered and folded or ensconced in dry-cleaning bags, stacked in neat piles on my bed.
“Can you believe I found this on Cloverly Road?” my mother said, bursting with excitement, as she held up a tired, old blue cloth coat. “Someone’s moving, and they threw it out by the curb. Have you tried it on yet?”
I picked up the coat. “I don’t like the style,” I said. “There’s too much padding in the shoulders.” I’d grown accustomed to turning down such gifts, always taking care not to hurt her feelings.
Undaunted, my mother would deliver the clothes to the Thrift Shop, the Grosse Pointe hub for secondhand finds, where she volunteered on Saturdays. Then she’d bring home a bag of secondhand clothing for which she had exchanged the original garments, and I’d have to come up with a whole new set of excuses for why I didn’t want to wear them.
“I have enough clothes,” I’d finally tell her, gesturing toward my closets.
That usually ended the conversation. My mother foraged, I stole. Each of us had figured out our own way of coping with my father’s disease.
Getting Away
CHARLIE STROH, 1981
(by Eric Stroh)
Grosse Pointe, 1980
The December light faded so suddenly I could hardly read my own words. Rather than switch on the chandelier, I slid my high school application essay across the dining table closer to the bay window. Snow was beginning to fall. The empty house creaked around me as I bore down on my paragraphs, determined to get down exactly how things had felt the summer before, when everything changed, it seemed, overnight.
I wrote about my parents’ faces—pale and swollen with sleeplessness—and the knotted feeling inside my stomach. Something terrible was happening: my mother had given up playing backgammon; my father had stopped leaving for work. I described the hushed voices, the closed doors, my gnawing sense that everything would come apart at any moment, that only a barely discernible tensing of all my muscles might hold it together.
My parents sealed themselves in the library for days. “Whatever you do,” my father said as he pulled the door behind him, “do not come in here.”
Whitney and I sat on the porch watching TV, our blank faces masking our alarm, buoyed at least partly by The Brady Bunch, Bewitched, Happy Days. My younger brother’s auburn hair was oddly disheveled, his trousers an inch too short. How I envied my older brothers, both of them off at college, Charlie a sophomore and Bobby a senior.
On day three my parents emerged: drained, older, yet united in their conviction that we should know the truth.
“It’s so awful to have to tell you this,” my mother began in a cracked voice, the puffed wedges underneath her eyes by now a deep purple. “But it’s important you know: your brother Charlie is a drug dealer.” Her eyes filled up with tears and she looked away.
My father dragged on his cigarette dismissively. “We’re taking him out of college. Putting him into the Marines to clean him up.”
As my mother wept my father put his cigarette into the ashtray and gently rested both his hands on her shoulders. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen them touch.
“You must never mention a word about this to anyone outside the family,” my mother said to Whitney and me with unusual sternness, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand. “Nobody at all.”
I felt the news and accompanying emotions seal themselves off inside my body with the ease of a closing elevator door. Drug dealers were something you saw on TV, not in my own family. I remembered an episode of Starsky and Hutch where the drug dealer lived in an abandoned apartment on the outskirts of town. Starsky kicked in the door while Hutch aimed the gun.
I turned on the chandelier so that I could reread my essay. Outside the snow was falling harder now, and a few stray sparrows pecked aimlessly at the frozen ground.
My last winter in Michigan.
Next year I’d be gone—away at boarding school for ninth grade, and away from this house. I’d been waiting to go since sixth grade, counting down the years impatiently.
The applications all asked for an essay on an experience that had changed my life. And so while other eighth graders wrote about their golden retrievers dying, I wrote about Charlie’s drug bust and what it had done to our family, the shame and silence spreading from my parents to us, and then into just about every aspect of our lives.