that held no appeal for me and Simon, whom she had pulled out of school and taken with her. And after a long winter school year in Vermont, which we joined a couple of months after it had already started, we returned, decisively and definitively, to our dad and the remnants of the house we grew up in for our first summer after their divorce.
My father, for his part, had bought the Barry Gibb and Barbra Streisand Duets album and played “What Kind of Fool” over and over and over, like a much younger man, or even a heartbroken boy, might have done.
It was kind of tremendous timing to hit adolescence just as the family was disintegrating. It’s not too bad to live out your Pippi Longstocking fantasy right when you most seek independence from your parents and are practicing it so ardently. There was no curfew and no dress code. My distracted, self-absorbed dad was probably trying to figure it all out himself—how to be forty-five and single after all those years of being married to a woman I believe he loved emphatically and who brought such concrete order to his otherwise watercolor life. He worked forever hours, then fell asleep in his bed with the light on and the crossword puzzle half-finished, and his felt-tipped pens left large black ink spots where they bled into the sheets.
But that summer happened to coincide with one of my dad’s worst financial periods ever. Some had been bad, but this would not be bone-issimo. Nor bone-ified. This would be the summer of boneless living. Gasoline was being rationed and you could fill up your car only on odd or even days, according to the date on your inspection sticker. My father was being so aggressively pursued by banks and creditors that our home phone—the bone phone—began to ring punctually every morning starting at seven-thirty. My dad went to New York and hid there for the bulk of summer, launching a show for which he’d designed the sets. That show just made it through previews and all of eight performances before they were taking down the marquee letters “Got Tu Go Disco!” and nobody got paid what they were owed. I answered the phone every morning and gave truthfully vague answers concerning my dad’s whereabouts, not to derail the creditors, but because I actually didn’t know where he was or when he would be able to be reached.
There followed one of the many, many fall semesters when we each arrived on our various campuses only to be barred from registration and directed to the bursar’s office, where the administrator shook her head “no” unsympathetically and seemed to enjoy, on some level, that cocktail of panic and humiliation and despair blooming in us. Private schools for all five children, both in high school and college, in spite of the artist’s paycheck?
Overreaching? Not in our vernacular. De-Bone-aire. My father has said a hundred times, and I have paid attention, that it’s stupid to let money be the reason you don’t do something.
By the time my parents might have realized—a glance in the rearview mirror—that they’d abandoned us, we were not to be recovered. That summer was the definitive end of some things and the rather hastened beginning of many others. While Pippi charmingly moved her horse onto the porch and wore mismatched striped socks when she found herself alone, I smoked cigarette butts salvaged from public ashtrays and sidewalks and retrieved from the asphalt from passing drivers who flicked them out the car window. I wore Candie’s spiked heels that I shoplifted and a watermelon-red tube top. I did my first line of coke, and then my second and third, and made lots of “friends” in town who, like me, had no curfew and nobody watching, but who, unlike me, were twenty and not thirteen. I hastily grazed through the menu of adult behavior and tried on whatever seemed attractive, for whatever inchoate reasons, as they occurred to me. It was a spectacularly scattershot and eclectic approach, as I found myself still going to Little League practice in the afternoons while reading D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love at night, because it had a photograph of naked people in bed on the back jacket.
But quickly I realized that I would need money. I had entered a few of my neighbors’ houses by crawling in windows when I knew they wouldn’t be home or sometimes even just walking in the unlocked front door and for