His music graced the screen and the theater worlds for decades. Then his success stopped. He kept taking jobs and striking out. The awards stopped. The phone calls stopped. The A-list jobs disappeared.
It would be nice to line it up with the moment my mother left. I was five years old, and she walked out the door. But that exit didn’t hold him back. He actually found even greater success. It was the woman after her (the trophy wife) who held him back. Louisa Lorraine, my erstwhile stepmother. When Louisa walked out the door (shortly after walking in it), his career started to suffer. That’s when he created the rules. The rules that he had to follow so his music would come together again. So his composition would be successful. So he could give it meaning. Example: He could only eat white foods on mornings he worked in the studio. He had to wear one specific pair of jeans on days he was meeting with potential clients (and when those jeans fell apart, he had to go to the same store to get a new pair to replace them). Rain and I were only allowed to drink certain things (apple juice okay; soda terrible). We could only leave the house (or return) at certain times during the day. This rule became particularly difficult to navigate when my father deemed two to five in the afternoon unlucky. The two of us would stroll around the village, trying to look like we had somewhere to be. This was Montauk. There were limited places to pretend to go.
And if you think I turned into a liar, I had an excellent role model. You should have seen the type of lies my father told. In order to keep his rules intact, he lied to everyone in his life—the people he worked for (he would make up reasons he had to turn new music in on certain days), the people working for him (he would provide a variety of tasks so they would walk in and out of his studio door the right number of times), our school (he’d make excuses to avoid a student-teacher conference because he decided it could jinx his work). What he actually had to work on was honoring his intricate system of rituals. He betrayed anyone and everyone in order to maintain it—to give himself the room to adhere to new rules whenever they came up for him.
My sister and I had different reactions to the rules. She was the typical caretaking firstborn. She tried to help him keep everything intact. She would put on the coffee in the morning so he wouldn’t have to walk into the kitchen before working. (If she did it for him and delivered it to him in the studio, he was allowed to drink it.) She would make dinner at night on the safe plates (so she could easily cajole him into having something to eat).
On the other hand, I was the second born. And I tried to do everything I could to mess with his rules, to show him they didn’t add up to anything useful. I would serve him breakfast on the bad plates and only tell him afterward. I thought it would prove to him the rule had no merit—he hadn’t been unable to work after eating, he hadn’t passed out with the first bite. He never saw my lessons as loving, though. He saw them as acts of hostility.
When I tried to point out that if the rules were actually working he would have already started composing scores he was proud of again, he would shut down entirely. He didn’t see it that way. He saw the rules as the only way back to artistic success. My inability to accept that seemed like proof to him of my defiance. It was proof to him that I lacked imagination in my own life.
So, since Rain would oblige, he dealt with her. And he slowly—and completely—retreated from me.
I think my sister never forgave me for that. She forgave him for having the rules. Maybe she figured he couldn’t do anything to get rid of them. But she felt that I should have helped to maintain them—helped her not have to maintain them all on her own.
She was furious at me for leaving Montauk and going away to college. She, after all, had made the opposite decision upon graduating from high school. But as angry as she was that I left, she was even angrier that I hadn’t done what I needed to do while I had been there to pretend my father was functioning, to make our lives work under his regime of crazy.
Which led us to our current relationship, or lack thereof. It explained why we had seen each other a grand total of five times since our father’s funeral nine years before. The first time was to go over the will. There was no money to divide, only the house to consider. The second time was for my wedding to Danny. Rain was a fan of his, probably because our father had been. The third time was for her wedding to the man that would become Sammy’s father. He was a professor at Southampton College—Rain’s continuing-education professor at Southampton College—and it was our best reunion, Rain too happy to focus on hating me. The fourth time was when Sammy was born. Sammy’s father, who had left a pregnant Rain for a different student, was gone by then. And the fifth time was when Sammy was two months old. Danny was working on a house in East Hampton. I made the mistake of telling her that was why I’d come to visit. She made the mistake of not seeing it as a gesture, nonetheless, and telling me to leave, Sammy a delicious little baby, held tightly in her arms as she closed the door.
All these years later, my sister still didn’t know how to forgive me for leaving her alone to handle our father. She still wanted to close the door and walk away.
I still hadn’t forgiven her, either, but for the opposite thing. I hadn’t forgiven her for spending so much time taking care of our father and his rules, even though she was the only mother figure I had, that she had stopped taking care of me.
My sister thought I left her. But, if she was paying attention, she’d see that she had stopped being around for anyone to leave.
19
Sammy read her novel during breakfast, not engaging with me at all.
When we got back to the house, she went up to her loft, and I walked into the bedroom to find Rain fresh from the shower, putting on her clothes for work.
Rain was a senior manager at the Maidstone, a sweet little hotel in East Hampton. She had worked there since she was twenty-one, starting off at the front desk. She now practically ran the place. And there was nothing wrong with her job, except how wrong it was for my sister. For one thing, she hated people—and she had to deal with them all day. For another, she had graduated number one in her class at East Hampton High and was nothing short of a math genius. Harvard had wanted her, and Princeton. She could have gone anywhere and done anything. She could have taken a job in some think tank where she never needed to be nice to a single person ever again. She should have gone somewhere other than down the street.
She crossed her arms over her chest, not trying to hide her disdain for me.
“Where’s Gena?” she said.
“She never showed up,” I said. “You really might want to rethink your childcare choices.”
She shook her head, walking toward her closet. “Sammy has got to stop lying to me.”
“How is Thomas?”