Twisted Family Values Read online

  “Very funny. I was serious, but forget it. It’s probably gnarly with moles.”

  “Like yours down there.”

  “Yeah, right. Like you know.”

  “I know Grandpa Dun’s Playboys.”

  “How come you get to see pictures of boobs and private parts and I have no idea what a dick looks like? We should be able to sneak naked men magazines. But there aren’t any.”

  “I think there are. I think Burt Reynolds was in one.”

  “He was?! No way. Okay. Just show me what it looks like. Or, fine, don’t show me. Draw me a picture. Just make it look real. I want to be prepared when I see one.”

  Choo laughed. “Prepared for what?”

  Bizzy was exasperated. “I don’t know. That’s what I’m saying!”

  Choo’s hard-on was officially gone as he recalled his favorite car chase from Baretta. Robert Blake was always up for adventure. Choo thought he should be more like Baretta. I’m up for adventure, he thought. “Fine, I’ll show you. Jeeze,” he said with a smile, and unbuckled his belt. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

  “Who cares, let’s go,” Bizzy said, excited about the prospect of seeing a real live penis and not just some dumb photo from National Geographic. “It’s gonna be soooo ugly. I can’t wait.”

  Choo ignored her and unzipped his fly, saying, “This is so lame.”

  Bizzy’s eyes were glued to Choo’s pants. “C’mon, it’s no big deal. It’s for research. Is it gonna be gross? I don’t want to be grossed out.”

  “Then cover your eyes. It’s not gross. It’s my dick. Don’t tell anyone, okay?”

  “Obviously. Cross-my-heart-hope-to-die,” Bizzy said as if it were all one word.

  Choo reached into the flap on his plaid boxers and pulled out the weirdest, wrinkliest, hot dog-looking thing Bizzy had ever seen.

  “Is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Totally gnarly.”

  “Hey, be nice. It’s my dick. Don’t touch it.”

  “Gross.” She crouched down a little to examine the flaccid penis and noticed the tiny slit in the center of its smooth dome top.

  “Isn’t it magnificent?” said Choo with bravado. He, too, found it comically unimpressive.

  “Is that where the pee comes out?” said Bizzy.

  “Among other things.”

  “Ew! Gag me. Don’t be gross!” she said, and thwacked him on the thigh.

  “You wanted to learn about it, Miss Body Science Professor.”

  “It seems wiggly. And not very big.”

  “It gets bigger.”

  “Oh. You mean it will get bigger. When you get older?” Bizzy was studying the penis as intently as she might a pet turtle in a cardboard box.

  “No, I mean it gets bigger, um, sometimes. It was just…”

  “Oh,” Bizzy said, but didn’t understand what he meant. Then she put it all together and decided to ask him point-blank. “Was that a hard-on before?”

  “Yup.”

  “I thought so. Is it distracting to have that thing always dangling in your pants?”

  “I’m pretty used to it,” Choo said, and turned it this way and that as if he, too, were looking at it clinically for the first time.

  “It’s gotta feel majorly strange,” she said to herself, convinced she knew the truth of its strangeness. “Just hanging there, in the way, like, all the time.”

  “It doesn’t,” Choo said, perfectly at ease with his penis in hand. “And it’s not in the way. I’ve had it my whole life.”

  “Do you ever wish you could unhook it and keep it in a shoe box until you need it?”

  “I do not.”

  Candid questions and deadpan answers continued downstairs while upstairs Choo’s father, Dick, arrived two hours early.

  Richard Muir insisted on being called Dick. However, behind his back he was also known as Dickhead, Dickweed, or Douchedad by his erstwhile family, even before divorce was imminent. To his face, his children had eventually refused to call him Dad and only used Dick, with an emphatic D, launching the word into the air with multiple earned innuendos. It irked him, and he corrected them every time.

  Tonight he was taking Choo and Rah back across town to his apartment for the remainder of the weekend and had showed up early. He often did, or late, so as to keep the family constantly off balance. It was his way of lording it over his children, wielding the power he still needed to feel. He would claim, “I’m just teaching them how the world really works,” but they hated him for it. Cat did, too.

  Not wanting to talk to Dick unless she had to, Cat wordlessly pointed to the basement door. “What a dick,” she said once he was gone, as she had time and again.

  Dick blustered his way downstairs in his tan Burberry overcoat and paused when he reached the bottom landing, just long enough to survey the depravity. “Where’s Charles?” he groused. Georgia looked up from the melee to say, “I don’t know,” but Piper overlapped, “In there,” and gestured toward the furnace room door.

  What followed was a scene that could have been contained had Dick been a better or bigger man. Unfortunately, empathy had always eluded him—that and the ability to identify his emotions and control his hair-trigger temper. It was one of the main reasons Cat kicked him out and his children loathed spending time with him. But they had no choice; the grown-ups made the rules. Dick had forgotten what it was like to be a child full of innocent wonder. He was also a product of the fifties, coming of age at a time when good girls didn’t let certain thoughts cross their minds, much less ask questions or explore their urges. And here was Claire’s daughter—his ex-wife’s niece—in such a vile and unladylike position, kneeling in front of his son. Or the child thrust upon him as such.

  Dick’s temperature spiked and all reason left his grasp. It didn’t make a difference in his mind that Bizzy appeared to be simply looking. He called Bizzy disgusting and yanked Choo away by the upper arm—his belt partly unbuckled, lips trembling—then slammed his son against the flimsy wood paneling and dragged him out of the room with his privates exposed. The commotion drew Claire to the basement first, with Cat and Ned following on her heels. Cat tried to defend Bizzy, not clear on what had happened but certain her niece’s misdeed couldn’t possibly have invited such public shaming. “I was just looking! Like in health class!” was all Bizzy could think to shout, her arms outstretched, flapping the sentiment as if it would help win her case. “Don’t you get it?! It was dumb! Nothing happened! Nothing, nothing!” As the sisters and Dick pitched simultaneous fits, Ned tried to calmly intervene, but it was no use. Choo implored Ned as he was dragged up the stairs in his father’s unforgiving grip, “Tell Bizzy I’m so sorry,” to which Ned answered kindly, “I’m sure you did nothing wrong.” Then Choo could be heard letting loose a string of invectives against his father with a fiery vitriol he’d learned from the man himself.

  Downstairs, in front of the roomful of stunned children, Bizzy felt weak and fell to her knees. Tears streamed down her face and she choked on the words as she looked up at her mother, pleading, “Please believe me,” over and over again. Claire stood erect in the basement rumpus room she rarely visited, surveying the wreckage—the underage smoking and drinking—and calculating the loss to her social standing in town. Only the last of these was any real issue to her. She watched, quietly and steely, as her daughter’s entreaties devolved into hiccupping sobs. Her husband, Les, was nowhere to be found. Some of the younger kids were scared and whimpering, oblivious to what they’d witnessed but still quaking in the wake of Dick’s ire. The older kids stared at Bizzy. They’d known her forever as full of curiosity and blithe-spirited fun and wondered what happened and what pieces they’d missed. And though most of what they saw and heard wouldn’t fit snugly into a rational—if morally questionable—explanation for many years, they were pretty sure it was bad.

  Claire marched a crying and gasping Bizzy upstairs to the master bedroom, hissing that her behavior was “deplorab
le, loose,” and “depraved.” She grilled Bizzy with an icy composure that frightened as much as it condemned her. “What did you and Choo do in those blanket forts you made in the back hall linen closet when you were little?” Incredulous, Bizzy answered, “Nothing! We were playing! We were little kids, Jesus!” Claire glared for a moment, then said, “Don’t say the Lord’s name in vain, young lady,” and left without shutting the door. Bizzy sucked in what she hoped was all the air that existed in the world, or at least in the upstairs of her Aunt Cat’s house, and screamed, “We’re not. Even. Catholic!” But no one heard her above the party’s din. The drunken revelers were too busy singing along to “Love Will Keep Us Together” by the Captain and his doting Tennille. Except for Les—he heard her. Across the hall, Bizzy noticed her dad sitting on the edge of the bed in the guestroom, a scotch in hand, the ice having long since melted. He sat still as if sitting for a figure drawing class, not looking toward Bizzy but staring forward at God knows what.

  Claire went back down to the basement and lifted the needle off the stereo. “Desperado, why don’t y—” The older kids cringed; they feared permanent damage to their favorite cowboy sad song. “Children, there’s no need to bother over what went on tonight. It doesn’t concern you. And rumors are of little use to anyone, so no need to discuss what you don’t understand. Bizzy and Choo were just playing a little made-up game that got out of hand, that’s all. Do you understand?” Her apparent question was met with blank stares. “Do. You. Understand?” she repeated, this time enunciating the beginning of each word. The children mumbled, “Yes, Mrs. Chadwick,” in varying layers of volume and fear. Claire glared for punctuation, then left.

  Upstairs, Bizzy waited until she was able to catch her breath before looking out the doorway across the hall again to her father. “Hey, Dad?” she called thinly. Perhaps he didn’t hear her; maybe she hadn’t been loud enough. “Daddy, do you believe me?” she called this time with more effort. He turned and looked into her watery eyes, but his were just as hollow as before. “Why did you marry her?” Bizzy asked quietly, without condemnation but with honest wonder. It had never made sense to her. They had never seemed to like each other very much. She’d never seen them laugh. Les turned away from his only daughter and resumed his drunken stare. He probably can’t hear me, she decided.

  Cat was shaken. She spoke to Claire in a tone she hoped concealed her panic. “Claire, I think you should go easy on—”

  “We’ll handle it tomorrow,” Claire snapped. “It’s time to pull the lasagnas out of the oven.” And with that she redirected their focus back to the party.

  Cat thanked God she was no longer drinking while wanting, more than anything, to drink. She calmed herself by pouring French dressing onto iceberg lettuce for the oblivious masses and intoned the Serenity Prayer away from her sister’s view. To steady her hand she took deep breaths—she loathed seeing her ex.

  Cat regretted her impetuous nature at age twenty-two and how she was overcome by Dick Muir’s charm in three short weeks. He was handsome with a forthright confidence, and red flags she ignored. When she couldn’t get pregnant after two years of trying—heartbreaking failure, an eternity back then—Dick’s mother, Agnes, summoned them with her edict. She shamed Dick for not being able to impregnate his wife, then ushered forth his younger sister as a convenient solution. Peggy had become unintentionally pregnant with a married sculptor’s child while a junior abroad in England. Too late to take control of the matter, Agnes decided Dick and Cat would raise the child as their own. In return for their long-term discretion, Dick would be given a salaried position he’d not earned at Barclays in London. Cat would be the wife of a prosperous financier and have her motherhood wish fulfilled. Peggy would carry on with her reputation befitting a Philadelphia debutante intact, and the child would escape the shadow of being a bastard.

  Cat and Dick hopped the QE2 the minute everything was decided. The family was told Dick’s job offer couldn’t wait. Cat spent the months readying their London flat as Dick settled into his new job. No photos were expected; pregnancy images were distasteful. A visit from Claire was out of the question since she had little E.J. to chase after and Cat told her parents not to make the trip. The instant Cat cradled her new infant, Charles, she felt an overwhelming mother’s love. “Sent from heaven,” she cabled her friends. They moved back home within the year. Dick, however, couldn’t square himself with “raising another man’s son.” He was unkind to Choo and ignored him, preferring to read the paper or play golf. When Rah was conceived two years later, Cat was shocked and thrilled beyond belief. Dick muttered, “What good’s a girl?” So Cat wrote him off and raised them together with Claire, without his involvement, permission, or support. She parented pickled, alternating between sherry, black coffee, and bourbon, but never told a soul, not even her mother or Claire. Even after she met Ned in Alcoholics Anonymous, Cat wore Choo’s secret like a second skin. It was the 1960s and people could be cruel, even some in her town, in her own family. Keeping Choo’s secret meant securing his place as a Thornden—regardless of Agnes’s bribery, threats, or social condemnation. Cat would rather die than have Choo grow up questioning his worth. She vowed to take to the grave that he wasn’t a blood relative.

  * * *

  Claire called a meeting the next morning in her kitchen between Bizzy and Choo, Les, Cat, and Ned. She reiterated in a tribunal-style manner that “nothing happened.” Choo retorted, “That’s because nothing did happen. Jesus, Aunt Claire.”

  Cat said, “Watch your tone, young man.”

  To which Bizzy added, “Oh, I forgot to tell you, Choo, we’re super religious now.”

  Cat said, “Let’s just not discuss it, okay?”

  “There’s nothing to discuss. Everyone just stop having a hairy conniption over this, okay?” Bizzy said, exasperated; then, bored with all adults and their idiot ways, she put her forehead on the table and spoke into the cherrywood. “Plus I have homework.”

  “So do I,” said Choo. And with that Claire dismissed everyone, and, true to WASPy form, the matter was closed, to Cat’s great relief. But that evening as Bizzy was falling asleep she became stuck in a disparaging spiral. Was there something wrong with her? It was just a penis. If it was his elbow no one would have freaked. It was pretty dang ugly for everyone to flip out over. Just because he pees out of it, who cares? It’s not like I broke it. Jesus. It took her hours to fall asleep.

  The rumpus room episode appeared swept under the table, though Claire still sent E.J. or Rah to check on them occasionally, even if they were only playing rummy in the next room. Claire felt it her job to be vigilant. Bizzy and Choo saw through her mistrust and egged E.J. on to mess with her. Delighted, he reported back to his mom they were playing “strip backgammon.” Then they giggled together as Claire lost her mind. Of all the folks caught up in the tumult, Bizzy and Choo moved on the quickest. Piper did her best to stoke the rumors at school in order to improve her social worth, but wasn’t sure what exactly had happened, so the stories eventually fell flat. She spread that Bizzy and Choo had been caught making out, but the idea was so gross it didn’t stick. Local parents shot down such outlandish notions—not the Thornden kids, I highly doubt it. Choo’s anger over the event occasionally wound him up like a spring, his hands and shoulders tight, wanting to punch something. But as he and Bizzy walked home from school she counseled him, speaking calmly. “It’s all going to work out. Just ignore them.” His breath always steadied and his shoulders lowered as if a gentle tide had passed through him. He could experience calm again as if he’d been gently unwound. Only Bizzy had such a soothing effect. Not even his mother could make Choo feel this depth of belonging. Not even Cat could make him feel this much at home.

  Time healed Choo’s wounds and faded the community’s lingering doubts. By the end of the school year it was in the past. The cousins graduated from junior high and transitioned to the upper school. Choo channeled any residual anger by penning dark comics. Bizzy had plenty of guy
friends in high school, but no one ever made a move. She figured it was because they’d all known each other since kindergarten. Having no boyfriends at Larkspur Academy freed her up to make out with visiting shy boys at games. She became a connoisseur of French kissing under the bleachers but never bugged Choo to practice. She knew he had his hands full with Sissy Bickers. Sissy was Choo’s four-year, on-again/off-again girlfriend, who was too adorable, apparently, to let herself sleep with him. He, in turn, was too nice to pressure her and so became Olympic at patience and masturbation. All the while Bizzy became a champion at drinking.

  On weekends they entertained—their moms taught them well—having friends over for pool parties and Quarters. Bizzy’s self-appointed job was to get everyone dancing, and Choo’s job was to keep everyone alive—especially those who were pushed into the pool in all their sherbet-colored, stonewashed clothing. There was always Lipton’s onion soup and sour cream dip, and mini-eggrolls to soak up the alcohol, plus port wine cheese spread and peach schnapps stashed behind hedges for late-night retrieval. Bizzy was terrible at Quarters and lost often, so had to drink more than most, which made her horny and want to dance more, especially if someone put on Rumours. Choo held her long hair back when she upchucked, then stealthily put her to bed, placing her Dr. Scholl’s on the floor and drawing the covers up to her chin. Then he set the kitchen mixing bowl on the floor next to her bed in case she needed it in the morning.

  By senior year Bizzy excelled in English, history, and art and spent long hours after school on the home-ec room sewing machines. She made hats and elaborate Halloween costumes at fifteen dollars a commission, excelling at bathmat Chewbaccas and bedsheet Princess Leias. Piper continued to bully Bizzy, making her feel lousy about herself, and Sissy Bickers made Choo feel unwanted. So the cousins watched old black-and-white movies Nana Miggs recorded off the TV and played endless games of Ping-Pong in the shed. Choo had had a successful run, doing well in chemistry, soccer, and DOS computing. But his real passion was directing like his idol, John Cassavetes. He shot scenes he’d written after school with Ned’s Betamax camcorder and bribed Piper, Georgia, and E.J. to act naturally. E.J. insisted he play the lead, which was fine with Choo, and Piper played Gena Rowlands with her cigarette held high. The island counter in his kitchen stood in for a bar, and the Charlie’s Angels wigs always managed to make cameos. Bizzy cheered on Choo’s ideas for new script concepts while he cheered her sketches for hats that looked like desserts. Blues Brothers meets Blade Runner? “Yes,” she’d tell him, “go for it! I dare you!” Eraserhead meets Eating Raoul? “Why not?” A wide slice of chocolate mousse cake worn at a rakish angle? “Totally,” Choo told her, “knock your socks off.”