Fiction Ruined My Family Read Free Page A

put on an old top hat and tails of his father, Dagwood’s.
    My uncle Tom (not our real uncle, but our father’s best friend) was dating my aunt Carol (my mother’s half sister). These two couldn’t have been a more unlikely couple. Tom was boozy, prone to break out in song at any moment or suddenly sit down and write a musical. He and my father had written a really funny election musical called GUV! and also a Watergate Christmas carol, and they did, in fact, with a few drinks under their belt, head out with a large group of drunken St. Louis Democrats in 1972, and sing it door-to-door. But one carol no one ever expected Tom to take to the streets with was Aunt Carol. Uncle Tom had been drunk for days.
    It wasn’t just the alcoholics the storm was rattling; the animals were out of sorts as well. Our dog, Jubjub, ate my dad’s nine-foot surf-casting rod, and one of the corgis belonging to the neighbor living in the icehouse next door ran off into the storm.
    The dog’s owner, Eleanor Ward, came by to see if it had taken shelter in our barn. Mom and Dad invited her in for a drink. I loved the way they got someone a drink as the response to any dilemma. So cinematic. Like a social doctor. I couldn’t wait to say to someone who came to me with a serious problem, “My God, Jan, that’s awful. Can I get you a drink?” or even better, “You look like you could use a drink.”
    Eleanor and Kate were sent out to look for the missing corgi. Through the rain and winds they searched the fields and the farm’s dirt roads. When they returned, the little lost dog was inside playing with my sister Julia while Eleanor and Mom and Dad sang songs from Candide blaring on the stereo. Mom and Dad were good together, they looked great together, he was six-one with dark brown hair, she was five feet and blond, they were singy and dancy and funny, and it seemed to me during this storm that love was fun and costumed and gusty and uncertain.
    Then, with a very limited amount of money that would have to last us an entire year in New York and with borrowing from Nonnie being an absolute impossibility, my mother joined the Devon Yacht Club shortly after we arrived. The Devon Yacht Club was the ramshackle alternative to the real country club in East Hampton, the Maidstone Club. Devon was on the sound, Maidstone was on the ocean. The Maidstone was a Tudor manse built in 1891. Devon was a cluster of crumbly old gray-and-white clapboard buildings that needed a paint job so badly that from out on the sound it looked like a coconut cake. The main building had dances every Thursday night. (For which Mom bought four . . . what can only be called gas station attendant jumpsuits—colorful oufits with stripes down the side that had little Pennzoil and Sunoco patches on the arms—for all of us to wear if we needed to pull a sophisticated gas station look together. Everyone got a different color. My gas station jumpsuit was white and blue.)
    This was a signature move of my mother’s, buying four of the same item in four different colors. With four of us being so close in age—my mother had four kids in five years, or two sets of Irish twins with a one-year break—this retail practice seemed reasonable to her. Eleanor was the oldest, then Katharine, then a year off, then Julia and then me.
    My dad wasn’t a country club kind of guy, but rumor had it that George Plimpton, who lived next door to Devon, had a Fourth of July rivalry with the club’s fireworks display every year, which must have sounded fun and New Yorky to the St. Louisan in my dad, and isn’t this why we came to New York? I mean, you can write a book in St. Louis. You cannot, on the other hand, have a gin and tonic with George Plimpton at Busch’s Grove in Ladue. And he probably figured the club would get everybody out of the house during the day so Mom could type up his finished pages and he could write. My father