As I wrote the story, I felt stronger, clearer—separate from those events for the first time. I wrote about the tension in the house, breaking it down into scenes with characters and dialogue, constructing not what actually had happened, but something that felt even realer than that. I wrote everything I’d been forbidden to say, everything that gave me back my voice. I wrote draft after draft, trying to get at the truth.
Charlie had been selling cocaine, a drug I knew about from Time magazine. I’d seen pictures of it, lines of white powder on the cover. My parents had heard the news from Charlie’s college dean earlier that year, in the spring. He was expelled, and, under pressure from my parents, immediately enrolled in Marine boot camp in San Diego, leaving in early June. But as June passed into July, everything kept changing. And the tension in the house got only worse.
Coming home from day camp or tennis lessons, Whitney and I watched TV in the library, or rode skateboards up the street with my cousins Pierre and Freddy. In his universal attempt to avoid my father, Whitney routinely asked Freddy if he could spend the night at his house, but Aunt Nicole sometimes locked the kids outside while the house was being cleaned, or while she napped, and for hours at a time no one would know where Whitney or Freddy had gone. They were nine and ten at the time.
When Whitney finally came home, he’d steer clear of my father even as he sought approval by doing small chores around the house—unloading the dishwasher, say, or feeding the cats. But my father would simply complain about the direction the forks faced in the cutlery drawer, or the ratio of dry cat food to canned food in the cats’ bowls, and Whitney began to wear a permanent expression of defeat.
I usually stayed in my room playing Led Zeppelin and Rolling Stones albums over and over. Sometimes my father would throw open my door and shout, “Turn down that goddamn rock ’n’ roll!” and I’d grab the volume knob so fast the record would skip. Later, I’d turn it all the way up again, partly to block out the eerie silence in our house, but also eager, in a way, for any interaction with my father.
I often found myself thinking about Charlie, who had turned strange over the last couple of years. Once tanned and vital, his face had grown pale and blemished, his eyes flattened like old decals. When he was home, he was, more often than not, on the phone or outside the house talking with people I didn’t recognize, people who came up our driveway in their unfamiliar cars while my father was downtown at work. Charlie referred to the visitors as his “good buddies,” but he never had much else to say about them. He crept around the house, always appearing busy, any closeness I’d felt with him utterly replaced by a disquieting distance.
Charlie wasn’t the only big change under way. The Stroh Brewery was acquiring the F&M Schaefer Brewing Company of Pennsylvania. My father rarely talked about what was happening at work anymore and never wanted my mother to throw parties for his brewery colleagues at our house. He stopped flying to Hollywood, and soon new Stroh’s Beer commercials were on TV—commercials that seemed to surprise my father as much as the rest of us. In one, the outlaw Jesse James held up a stagecoach for a case of Stroh’s. It was exactly my father’s kind of ad, but he walked out of the library after it aired, without saying a word.
In the evenings after work, my father often stayed out at the bars, or ordered pizza to eat in front of the TV while the rest of us had dinner in the dining room. On the rare occasions when he spoke to us at all, it was to shout.
My mother carried on as if everything were still normal, taking us for a swim at the club while she played her backgammon, out for Chinese food once a week, on errands to the dry cleaner, the grocery store, and the bank.
“Do you know what Charlie does in the Marines?” my mother said one evening in August as she placed plates of steak and potatoes in front of Whitney and me. “He wakes up at four a.m. and does a hundred push-ups. Then he cleans all the bathrooms on the base before breakfast.” She forced a smile. “Don’t worry, Charlie’s going to be just fine.”
“Does Charlie like being a marine?” I asked.
My mother gave me a puzzled look, as if liking the Marines were completely beside the point. “He’s there to clean up his life,” she said finally. “Put himself back together.”
My mother’s optimism was contagious, and we all believed in the quick fix the Marines would provide for Charlie. I pictured him picking up the pieces of his life, like so many shards of broken glass, going back to college, and eventually working at the brewery—the path expected of every young man in the Stroh family.
At the end of the summer, my parents flew out to San Diego for Charlie’s boot camp graduation and stayed with friends in La Jolla.