THE GOLD FISH: Worse Things (2.12)

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Karen rapped against the bathroom door. “Daaaad! Come on! Get out! I gotta get ready for school.”

No response.

She rapped again and yelled louder, “DAD!”

Joan appeared from around the corner, pulling on a robe. “Karen Ann! What the hell is wrong with you? Screaming like a banshee at seven o’clock in the morning.”

“Dad’s in there, and he won’t open up. I think he’s asleep. On the toilet!”

Karen’s body collapsed in on itself as only a teenager’s can. “It’s so gross!”

“Goddamned sonofabitch.”

“Well tell him to get out!” cried Karen.

Roused into action, Joan banged on the door with the flat of her hand. “Don, get out of there! NOW. The girls need to get ready for school.”

A memory flashed in her head. Her own father walking her to her first grade classroom on the first day of school, his hand a steadying presence on her back as he ushered her inside. Okay, ushered might not be the right word. Pushed was more like it. Her father hadn’t exactly been warm. The minute she was inside, he’d turned and run, in fact. But at least, he had been present.

Naturally, Don would have no idea -- no goddamned clue -- that the new school year started that day. It wasn’t enough that Don couldn’t ever be bothered to take the girls to school, monitor homework, pack a lunch, etc., etc, but was expecting him to remember that his daughters actually attended SCHOOL too much to expect?! Apparently, it was. Who could keep track of such an inconsequential detail? A detail that had no bearing on his everyday life. Certainly not like the much more important start of the GODDAMNED FOOTBALL SEASON.

Rage raced through Joan’s body, making her apoplectic. She banged on the door again.

“DON!! WAKE UP! GET OUT OF THERE. Stop being an idiot!”

The only response, a soft snore.

“Go in there and make him come out,” implored Karen.

Joan looked at her daughter like she had two heads. “You think I can move his big ass, when he’s still drunk and asleep?!”

“Ewww,” said Barbie who, roused by the commotion, had joined the party outside the bathroom door.

Karen stomped her foot “This is so unfair. Shay’s gonna be here any minute.”

Joan stood frozen to the spot, incapable of forming a response, her mind a vortex of turmoil. Exactly how much of this was she supposed to take? How much could she take?

Her mind, like it did more and more these days, returned to a conversation she had had with a certain Father O’Connell when Karen was just a baby. It still filled her with rage to think about it. She’d been married less than two years and it was already abundantly clear that her marriage was a disaster. Don wasn’t participating in the marriage, in the family, in the home. At all. In any way, shape, or form. And Joan was completely overwhelmed with the house, her baby, and the never-ending pressure of keeping up appearances. Acting to her parents, her sister, her friends, her neighbors, even to her own goddamned mother-in-law who surely knew what she was facing, that everything was just fine. Absolutely fine.

Was there a lonelier feeling in the world? Don was clearly oblivious to her burdens -- or if he was aware, he sure didn’t show it -- and the shame of being so thoroughly dismissed, so unconsidered, was bottomless. Even if she could have mustered up the courage to speak to someone about it, who on earth would she tell? Certainly not her mother-in-law, Hazel, who always turned a blind eye to her son’s shortcomings. Or her sister, Betty, whose marriage to Joe -- as steadfast and as present as they come -- seemed text-book perfect. And Lord knows, she couldn’t confide in her own parents, who had, in fact, discouraged Joan from marrying Don from the get go. They had warned her that Don seemed “fast,” which in retrospect had been figuratively correct but also, hilariously, ironically wrong. Don didn’t do anything quickly, except maybe drink. But she hadn’t listened. She’d been stupid. Blind. And stubborn.

Because, for one, Joan absolutely couldn’t wait to get out from under her father’s roof and marrying Don was, or so it seemed at the time, her quickest exit route. Pop was a strange combination of total goofball (another guy who enjoyed being the life of the party) and a brutally volatile autocrat who had insane expectations. Joan recalled bitterly watching Barbara Ann Scott, the Canadian figure skater, swirl and twirl in the 1948 Olympics, when her father turned to her and Betty (who, at the time, were 13 and 16 respectively) and asked why they couldn’t do that? Neither girl had ever seen a pair of figure skates in real life, let alone ever had occasion or opportunity to go skating. Did he really expect either girl to have spontaneously combusted into an Olympic level athlete? Yes, he did.

Having just studied the Boston Tea Party and their protest against Taxation without Representation, Joan had joked to Betty later that night that they should hold a tea party of their own to protest their father’s Expectation without Demonstration. They’d laughed nervously at the comparison, certain that their father was being unfair and ridiculous, yet both still feeling vaguely inadequate. Because, in their heart of hearts, both knew they weren’t superlative at anything. At least, thought Joan, not yet.

So surely that must have been at the bottom of Pop’s refusal -- years later -- to send either of them to college. After all, Pop told himself and them on a near constant basis, that he only had an 8th grade education, and look at what he’d achieved! He had raised himself up by his own bootstraps, clawing his way up from an apprentice optician to owning his own optometry business! Higher education, Pop proclaimed at the time, was for morons who wanted to waste their parents’ money. If Betty and Joan wanted more school (featherbrained idiots!) they were welcome to it, but he wasn’t going to pay for it. But IF they were desperate enough to waste their own time and money, there was really only one choice: secretarial school. After all, what else could a woman do?!

Betty thought a smarter choice would be to marry Joe and get the hell out. Which she did with lightening speed.

But Joan figured she might as well try secretarial school and, to her great surprise and delight, discovered she wasn’t such a featherbrained idiot after all. Not only was her grasp of Gregg shorthand, with all its mysterious slashes and curlicues, almost instantaneous, but her fingers were capable of flying over a manual typewriter with an uncanny speed, all while her eyes raced over her own shorthand on the steno pad beside her. The man administering the typing test at aerospace engineering firm, Martin Marietta, told Joan she was one of the fastest, most accurate typists he’d ever seen. What he didn’t tell her was that she also had the nicest pair of legs and ankles he’d even seen. She was hired on the spot.

And God how she loved the work. For the first time in her life, she felt energized and full of purpose. Click-clacking down the halls in her black pumps and smart sheath dresses, a steno pad full of shorthanded notes about the launch of the new Titan missiles tucked under her arm. It was thrilling.

Until, of course, she’d married Don and her pregnancy with Karen began to show. Once her petite belly started straining the front of all those smart sheath dresses, Joan was promptly put on unpaid leave and told not to return until she got her figure back. This by the same ankle-admiring supervisor who had hired her, and who also felt the need to add -- with a sneer -- that no one in the company needed to be reminded of what she did at home.

What she did at home. And Gee, wasn’t he pleased with himself for that thinly disguised euphemism for having sex. God forbid that Joan, a married woman, should have desire.

Which hit the nail on the proverbial head. Because the second, deeply shameful reason Joan failed to heed her parents’ warnings about marrying Don was because she wanted him. Wanted him in that tingling, urgent, primal way. Back then, he had looked like Robert Goulet, a widow’s peak in his jet-black hair, his wide green eyes beneath thick, masculine eyebrows. Just looking at him, sitting next to him, necking with him in his sky-blue Oldsmobile had given her the shivers. She’d practically vibrated with need. But as a good Catholic, she knew she couldn’t sleep with him before they were married, so like an idiot, she had married him. To get laid. And look where it got her? She’d been punished for the sin of lust.

So back to her conversation with Father O’Connell. With a new baby, a baby-man for a husband, and no one else to talk to, who else could she turn to? Given the Catholic church had (sort of) gotten her into this mess, Joan thought -- in retrospect, naively, stupidly, of course -- they might be the ones to get her out. She’d been so young when she’d married. Maybe she could beg for an annulment? It would be a horrible admission and huge embarrassment -- for both Joan and her parents -- but she’d be out of the marriage without sin. With that hopeful notion, she had sheepishly approached her parish priest. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that he’d had other ideas, but of course it was. First, he had firmly reprimanded Joan for such a ludicrous thought given she already had a child -- clearly the marriage had been consummated. Then, in a tone bred of condescension and condemnation -- Father O’Connell had turned down his arrogant, sweaty, spider-veined nose, and asked her if she had forgotten the sanctity and holiness of the marriage sacrament? Hmmmm? When Joan had no answer for that, he’d gone on to suggest that God had generously bestowed her with the gifts of strength and competence.  And not only should she be grateful for these gifts, but it was also her sacred duty to honor Him by using them to support her husband. To compensate for the weaknesses that He had, in his divine wisdom, given her husband.

Joan had been stunned. And defeated. Driven by lust, she had made her bed, so to speak, and she was going to have to lie in it.

But truly, Joan asked herself as soft snores emanated from the bathroom, had Father O’Connell imagined THIS? Could she herself have imagined, all those years ago, THIS? That her husband would be passed out on the toilet on a random Tuesday morning, preventing his children from getting to their first day of school on time? What exact competency was she supposed to use to correct this situation? An immense, stupid tolerance for pain and humiliation, perhaps? Was that the kind of strength that godforsaken priest had imagined? Jesus Christ Almighty, she cursed to herself.

While Joan stared off into space, preoccupied with past humiliations, Barbie couldn’t help but think that yes, this was perhaps another example of her father doing something unusual, something that probably most fathers didn’t do.

Of course, she could ask Bridge. Could ask her if Mr. Tom ever fell asleep, drunk, on the toilet. But with 10 Sullivans in the house sharing one bathroom, Barbie kinda thought it was unlikely. And that pissed off feeling, or P.O.’d as Bridge would say, began to build again inside her.

Karen’s anger was more overt. “MOOOOMMM,” she yelled. “DO SOMETHING!”

Joan snapped back to the present day and the problem at hand. She glared at Karen and pointed down the stairs. “Use the bathroom in the basement! Now.”

“Gross,” Karen protested. “It doesn’t even have a sink, and it’s full of spiders!”

Joan reached into her robe pocket for her cigarettes and shook one out. “Oh grow up. They won’t bite you.” She lit the cigarette, inhaled deeply, and blew out a stream of smoke.

“And trust me, if they do, it won’t be the worst thing that can happen to you. Not by a long shot.”

Next → Happiness (2.13)