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Was she seriously saying that having hundreds of thousands of A Little Sunshine viewers would embarrass him? Or was it selling 150,000 cookbooks? Perhaps it was having so many loyal followers that the Food Network had decided to feature me prominently in prime time? But then I realized the part that would embarrass him. The part where I couldn’t cook. The part where I was only pretending to be who I told everyone I was.
“I’m hungry,” Sammy said. “I want to sit and I want to eat.”
Karen looked down at Sammy. “Sit! By all means, sweetie,” she said. “Can I get you your toast?”
Sammy looked back toward her book, turning the page. “I don’t know. Can you?”
Karen laughed again. “You’re a hoot, Sammy!” she said. Then she turned to me. “We’ll catch up, okay? And, man, I should have reached out when it happened. I’m sorry about your father. He was truly a great man.”
I felt a tightening in my chest. I didn’t know what to say, never kn
ew what to say when someone talked about my father. Especially someone like Karen, who seemed committed to talking about him as long as I would let her. Karen, who probably knew as much about him as I knew. He came to John’s every morning to read his paper, to enjoy a short stack of buttermilk pancakes. Not the usual three they brought. Bad luck.
“We still miss him around here,” she said.
“Oh, well, that makes one of us.”
I was unnecessarily harsh, but I was pissed off about her takedown, and I didn’t have the energy to pretend my father wasn’t who he was.
Karen stepped back. The insult of my father was apparently something she took personally.
“I’ll tell the hostess to get you guys menus,” she said.
Then she walked away.
On the upside, Sammy smiled. “Wow, you really told her,” she said.
She apparently liked rudeness directed toward her chilly-toast nemesis.
“Was she talking about Grandpa?”
I nodded. She had never met him, and yet there was a familiarity to how she said the word. What had Rain told her?
“Can we sit by the other windows now? Alisa is a way better waitress.”
“Great idea,” I said.
18
The story about my father was one I hated telling. He wasn’t an alcoholic. He didn’t hit us. He didn’t do much of anything, which I guess was the best way to describe what was wrong with him.
Steve Stephens. His parents had actually named him that, which he liked to say explained something about how he had grown up. I thought it was more telling that he was raised in Charleston, South Carolina, above his parents’ restaurant. They had planned for it to only be a lunch spot, but no one seemed to like their food. So, to make ends meet, they started dinner service as well. No one liked the food then, either, but they served alcohol, which everyone liked. They would play old ballads on the stereo, and people would stay late drinking, the music drifting upstairs into my father’s childhood bedroom until two A.M. If this sounds romantic, he didn’t consider it to be. My father would always say that it made him long for quiet.
Wouldn’t you consider it ironic, then, that he went on to become a famous composer? He was most notable for his film scores, composing the scores for eighty films. And he won all sorts of awards, his little gold statues and magazine covers lining his music studio.
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.
