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| Developing Pictures |
| 04.05.04 (12:31 pm) [edit] |
I have a picture in my wallet of a two year-old boy wearing movie star glasses. His Mom and Dad are holding hands, his brother is awkwardly leaning on his shoulder, and he has a big smile on his face. That boy is me. I still look at that picture everyday. It helps me remember that there must have been a time when everything was happy and easy.
The photo was taken two days before Mom and Dad separated. I should have seen it coming… but I was just two at the time.
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Mom remarried when I was five. His name was Chad and he was brilliant. He graduated Harvard medical school first in his class. “It’s easier than you think,” he said. I think he discovered his proclivity for little women (like my mother) long before that. He told me once that he never dated any girl larger that five four, one hundred twenty pounds. He doesn’t consider bigger girls attractive, he said. That’s strange, considering his size. He is more than six feet tall and well over two hundred pounds. It seems that average-sized girls would have better suited his body type. I wondered why he never gave them a try.
He moved to Los Angeles after medical school and started a successful private practice in anorexic and bulimic psychiatry. Girls from around Hollywood and even the world came to see him (they still do). He and mom don’t say anything, but I’m pretty sure that’s how they met.
Mom tells the typical eating disorder story at cocktail parties. Once she was fat. She felt bad about it, so she made herself skinny. But she became too skinny. So her sorority sisters had to check her into a hospital. Luckily a miracle doctor saved her (she still won’t say who). Two years later she married the fucker. Now she’s five foot four, one hundred pounds, all better and married to the perfect man for fifteen years.
But he wasn’t a perfect father at all. Father? Well, he pretended to be my father. But he couldn’t fool me. I lived at my real Dad’s house three nights a week. Chad wasn’t my Dad. And anyway, we’re nothing alike. He’s a huge physical specimen and I’m a tiny little thing. He has hair all over his body and I’ve got a few specs under my arms. His mind is linear and calculating and mine is fragmented and candid. He’s successful and I’m, well… I can’t be his. There’s no way.
Growing up with Dad was difficult. In the beginning, he persistently called me his “little anorexic boy,” or “skinny bones Jake” even though I was always fairly chubby. Ironically, or perhaps not so much so, he called David his “water buffalo” or his “big fat tub of lard” even though he was extremely skinny.
I tried to figure him out. Was serious or was he joking? I couldn’t tell. So I asked Mom about the truth. She’d say, “It’s just his way of kidding around. You’re not anorexic at all.” I knew she was right. But I couldn’t seem to hear her. Apparently neither could David. Since then, we’ve both gone to great lengths to become the people he had told us we already were.
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Dad remarried when I was seven. Caron was homely, unimaginative, and not at all his type. I’m still not sure what he saw in her… and neither is he. “She was a good mother,” he says with a shrug.
Unfortunately, she didn’t have a good son. His name was Kirk, he was four months younger than I was, and he was crazy… even before his stepmother murdered his father.
That murder happened a year after he moved in with us, and it pretty much shot the marriage. The kid went berserk. He had always liked to throw metal objects at us, but his grief sharpened his aim in ways that practice could not. He ran around the house screaming and attacking David and I with hammers, door handles, or whatever else metal he could find.
Dad didn’t wait four years to turn his cards in this time. “She fucked like a nun, her thyroid problem was visibly worsening, and her son, well, he was a risk I wasn’t willing to take.”
After that second marriage, Dad knew he couldn’t endure another relationship without handcuffs. “I need my women to be pliable in both mind and body,” he says. And I don’t know how to respond when he says things like that. I never have.
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