Fiction Ruined My Family Read Free Page B

was the most distracted writer working in America. If my sister Katharine and I put together a game of catch in the backyard with some old ratty mitts we’d found, he’d come out within minutes looking for a piece of the action.
    â€œGive me that ball, Jean-Joe. Do either of you girls know who Dizzy Dean was?” and the game was brought to a standstill with a lively portrait of a Cardinals pitcher in the ’30s. I threw the ball as hard as I could. I did not, nor did any of us girls, push the ball off our shoulders like a shot put or “throw like a girl.” My father taught us curveballs from sliders, fastballs and screwballs. Later, during his boxing phase, we would learn jabs from hooks, how to throw a punch, turning your fist ever so slightly at the end of the extension, and basic footwork.
    My father caught my wild throw. “Jean-Joe, your tactics are a hundred percent Dizzy Dean. ‘The Diz,’ they called him. He and his brother Daffy were part of a team during the Depression called the Gashouse Gang.” He threw the baseball to Katharine. “They were the dirtiest, most low-down bunch of players—just terrific. Now, he first played for the Cards but later for the Browns, God, it must have been 1947—”
    I don’t ever remember him passing up going to the beach with all of us, even though he probably should have been doing some work. That summer my father cleared the beach twice in one week with shark spottings that turned out to be schools of fish. He ran up and down the beach, waving his arms, a maniac in yellow-and-green Lilly Pulitzer trunks, cupping his hands to his mouth to amplify the danger. “Shark! Out of the water! I mean now, God damn it!” he said as if the entire beach were made up of insolent daughters. It was the summer after Jaws came out. He hadn’t seen Jaws , of course, but everyone else had, and that was the problem. It got to the point where if he came down to the kitchen asking who wanted to go ride the waves at the beach, he was teased and made to promise not to save anyone that day.
    Days later you’d hear him on the phone to St. Louis talking about how he couldn’t get any work done.
    â€œJesus, Hereford, you wanna know how the novel’s coming? People wanting to play tennis in the middle of the afternoon and throw a ball around every five minutes and there hasn’t been one goddamn night that we haven’t been to somebody’s house for cocktails.”
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    At Devon we met Elise. She became Julia’s and my best friend. She was a summer person, not a townie like us. She went to Dalton with Robert Redford’s children. The closest thing we had come to a celebrity was seeing Stan Musial, Stan the Man, St. Louis Cards baseball great from the ’40s and ’50s, in the parking lot of my grandmother’s church after mass. Stan Musial / Robert Redford. Not much of a match. Elise’s father was a lawyer. They had a pool. To Julia and me, Elise was our George Plimpton, our idea of New York; she knew everybody. We weren’t going to meet anyone like her in St. Louis: she was urbane.
    Eleanor and Kate were in Junior Yacht, Julia and I were in Sandpipers, the younger kids at Devon. One day the Sandpipers all headed out on sailboats by ourselves. Elise and I and one other girl, Tracy, kept capsizing and were terrified. The motorboat that was meant to monitor new sailors, The Terror , was nowhere to be seen. Elise and I decided to swim back to shore, even though this meant breaking the cardinal rule of sailing, Never abandon your vessel. Elise and I were kicked out of Devon for abandoning our sailboat. I couldn’t go sailing anymore and I couldn’t go on the camping trip and I was banned from the Thursday dances for the remainder of the summer. I ended up playing a lot of tennis by myself, hitting balls against the old backboard on Stony Hill Farm, and strangely developed an