No Lifeguard on Duty Page 2

  The following week they ran into the “asshole” from the bar. Turns out he was a friend of Ray’s; they’d set the whole thing up to make my father look like a regular hero. My mother thought it was funny. I would have had the marriage annulled.

  They got an apartment in Brooklyn, and I guess those first few months were pretty hot. My mother was a looker. She wore stylish pumps and blood-red lipstick—not particularly original, true, but it worked. She loved the camera and the camera loved her back.

  MY MOM, JENNIE MARIE PIETRZYKOSKI. WHAT A SET OF PINS!

  NEWBORN ME, MOM, AND ALEXIS IN 1955.

  Alexis came along a year later. She didn’t love the camera. There’s a picture of her I’ll never forget: She’s about five years old and sitting stiffly on my father’s lap, and she has a look in her eyes that’s a caught-on-film cry for help. He was already into her. I guess five was old enough. I don’t know where that picture is today, but I’ve got it imbedded in my brain. I wish I could erase it.

  I came along five years later. My mother was working as a nurse in Manhattan, already dabbling with prescription drugs, and my father was grumbling about his nowhere career with the Navy.

  Now there was more bad news: another daughter. Ray was devastated. He’d been hoping for a boy and made no secret about it. I swear to God, I remember him hating me when I was barely a few weeks old. I know that seems unbelievable—I was way too young to be forming memories—but his hatred was the air I breathed from birth.

  When I was just eighteen months old, in 1957, the family moved from Brooklyn to Florida. “Ray dear”—as my mother called him—had been tossed out of the Navy for assaulting an officer. He was going to start again, in sunny South Florida. Become Captain of His Own Goddamn Ship.

  Only it never quite happened for him. He got a gig with the Coast Guard, but he didn’t think much of those “pussies,” so he ended up with the U.S. Merchant Marine. He hated taking orders, but he loved the sea. And he loved the long trips he got to take. So did we. Life was different when he wasn’t around. At night I’d kneel next to my bed and pray that the Seaman’s Union would call in the morning and drag him off to some remote hellhole, where he’d fall overboard in a storm and get eaten by a shark. Alas, all my prayers went unanswered. Ray always returned to the family. He couldn’t get enough of his family. Ray dear had a problem, see. He liked to be serviced. And with four women in the house, he felt entitled.

  I was nine years old when he came to my room one night and told me we were going to play the lollipop game, a special game for a father and a favorite daughter. And—We have a winner!—I was that favorite daughter.

  “This is the way it works,” he said, his voice low, excited. “You see this? This is Daddy’s dick. You rub it like this. You see how it’s getting all rubbery and big? Watch. Go ahead. Touch it. You see how hard it’s getting?” I was afraid to touch it, but I was more afraid of what would happen if I didn’t touch it. So I touched it. It didn’t feel like much. He came closer. “Now open your mouth,” he said. He came closer and closer. I refused to open my mouth. “Are you going to disobey your daddy?” he asked. His voice wasn’t low anymore. It was taut, strained to bursting. He pumped his cock, an inch from my face. “Didn’t you hear what I said?” he asked through clenched teeth. “I said, Open your mouth.”

  “I won’t,” I said. His left hand shot out with such speed and force that it knocked me clear off the bed. I opened my mouth this time—to scream—but he put me in a headlock and began to squeeze. I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was going to die. I could feel his hot breath on the back of my neck. He put his lips close to my ear. “You ungrateful little punk,” he whispered. “You’re nothing to me, you know that? Less than nothing. You’re trash. You’ll never amount to anything. Some day you’ll be on your knees begging guys to suck them off for a few bucks.” He flung me across the room and I lay in a crumpled heap in the corner, afraid to turn around and look at him. I took a deep breath, and then another and another. My lungs ached. My cheeks grew damp with tears. I bit my lip to keep from crying out. I was afraid to make a sound, but my heart was pounding so loud in my ears that I was sure he could hear it, too. He was still behind me; I could feel him hovering there, staring at my back, wild with anger.

  “Look at me,” he said finally. I was afraid to disobey him. I turned around, slowly, my whole body trembling. His eyes were red, his features twisted in fury. “You ever say a word about this, I’ll kill you.”

  That’s a father’s love for you.

  On the surface, we looked like every other family in the neighborhood. Those Wonderful Dickinsons. Three adorable girls: Alexis, the bright, bookish one, with her fair complexion, reddish hair, and green-gray eyes; me, Janice, olive-skinned and exotic-looking, just like her mother; and little Debbie, the junior gymnast, blond and blue-eyed and always smiling. Such lucky girls, too. That devoted, hardworking mother. And that wonderful father—so deeply in love with his daughters. And so protective, too! God help any man who even looked at them funny.

  Of course, most of the surrounding families had their own demons. Don’t get me wrong; it was a nice neighborhood, block after block of Mediterranean-style homes with well-tended yards and terra-cotta entryways. Some with pools even. But this was back in the days when eighteen thousand dollars would get you the Ponderosa, and all sorts of people came up with the money—from drug dealers to horny single mothers to your basic Stepford families.

  In short, it was a typical American neighborhood, with its fair share of typical American horror stories. And for a time I was convinced that the horror in our home wasn’t all that horrible. How could it be? We had a beautifully manicured lawn, bougainvillea bushes, Spanish tile on the roof. Maybe there were worse things going on next door, right? And how bad was it, really? I had fought my father off and won.

  One afternoon, though, I learned different. We’d just come home from school. Debbie was in the den, parked in front of the TV, watching Gilligan’s Island—dreaming a little girl’s dreams of escape. I was walking upstairs to dump my books and wash up and help Alexis get dinner started, when I heard something that sounded like an injured animal, crying for help. But we didn’t have a pet.

  ME AT THREE. NOTE THE DIANA VREELAND DO.

  I crept down the hall, toward my parents’ bedroom. The door was open a crack. I held my breath and took a step closer. I could see my father next to the bed, and—as I moved in for a better look—Alexis, kneeling on the mattress, facing him. She was crying; whimpering. But I couldn’t quite see what they were up to. I crept toward them, still holding my breath. One more tiny step—the floor-boards creaked—and my heart all but stopped. My father was…I can’t even go there. It was unspeakable, horrible. Alexis must have sensed my presence. She turned her eyes a fraction of an inch and saw me. Her eyes flashed: She was telling me to run.

  I stumbled back to my room and puked my guts out, then lay on the cold bathroom tile, numb with shock. That’s what I did. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. You can hate me for that if you want to. But you’ll never hate me as much as I hated myself. I know, I know. I was only nine. And Alexis was fourteen. But I should have done something. Anything.

  Still in shock, I washed my face and hands and went downstairs to get dinner started. Alexis appeared a few moments later. She wouldn’t look at me. She began setting the table, ignoring my third-degree stare. I didn’t know what to say. Her lower lip was torn.

  “Your lip is bleeding,” I said.

  And she said: “If you ever say anything about this, he’ll kill us all.”

  “Alexis—”

  “Don’t you get it, Janice?” she snapped, barely able to contain herself. It was scary: When she got angry like that, she looked like my father. “He’s been at it since I was five.”

  I couldn’t answer. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe. What the hell was going on here? My father was already having his way with one daughter. What, then, had he wanted with me? Variety? A new flavor? What was he, a
fucking connoisseur?

  A few minutes later he came downstairs and walked past us, into the den. He sat on the couch and put his arm around Debbie, and, as easy as that, the two of them sat there watching TV together. Alexis and I got the meat loaf in the oven, made a salad, finished setting the table.

  Alexis took a beer from the fridge and poured it into a chilled mug. She walked into the den with it, and he took it from her with a smile—a smile like a shark. “Thanks, kitten,” he said. “You’re the best.” I looked down at my hands. They were shaking.

  Half an hour later, just in time for dinner, Mom came home in her crisp little nurse’s uniform, smelling faintly medicinal, like the ward, floating on her cushion of air.

  And then there we were, the five of us, sitting around the dinner table, our heads bowed, saying grace, being grateful and thankful for the Good Lord’s wonderful bounty and for His Great and Infinite Love.

  And then we were eating. Father first, of course. The Goddamn Emperor. And almost immediately he would launch into his nightly litany: “Those porch monkeys! We ought to ship every last one of them back to Africa.” Or: “Those rich kikes with their gaudy yachts! You know why they have such big noses? Because the air is free!”

  Mother would just nod and smile, oblivious, and get up from time to time to go into the kitchen and dip into her not-so-secret stash. Anything to keep reality at bay. Alexis never said a word. Debbie would feel compelled to share with us every detail of the day’s television experience. Gilligan did such and such. And wasn’t Ginger just amazingly beautiful?

  Me? I did nothing. I said nothing. I just looked at Alexis, my heart breaking. And at my father, wanting to kill him. I was nine years old. I could hear myself screaming at the top of my voice, but I was screaming only in my head. And when my father said pass the bread, I passed the bread. The dutiful, spineless daughter.

  Saturday afternoons Ray would pile us into the car and drive us to Fort Lauderdale to look at yachts. We lived midway between the ocean, to the east, and the alligator swamps to the west. En route to the marina, there would always be an incident. Someone wouldn’t be driving fast enough. Or too erratically. Or Ray imagined that they had cut him off—deliberately. And invariably this led to a confrontation. He would maneuver his way ahead of the offending car and pin it to the curb, then leap into the street and scream and gesticulate wildly, thoroughly terrorizing some poor, innocent person. But he was careful: His victims were always old and feeble and nonthreatening (no shortage of those in Florida). Because, hey—Ray wasn’t exactly the courageous type. He would have fallen apart if one of them actually stood up to him.

  We three girls would sit there side by side in the back of the car, humiliated, watching him let off steam. It was as if he needed it; without the outlet for his rage, he would have exploded. He was the ultimate rageaholic.

  “Isn’t he something?” Mother would say from the front seat, smiling and nodding and looking for all the world as if she’d been lobotomized. “Isn’t he funny?” And I would think: This can’t really be happening to us. This can’t be my real life.

  Sundays we went to church, hair neatly combed, clean behind the ears, dressed in our Sunday finest. Those Wonderful Dickinsons, all in a neat row in their regular pew, glowing, putting the long years of enforced Bible study to good use, the Lord’s Light Shining Brightly From Within. Yeah, sure! I would kneel and beg God to please please please change things, to please please make our lives the way they were meant to be. But was He listening?

  It had been almost a year now since I’d found out about Ray and Alexis, and for all that time I’d been desperate to tell someone about it. Mother would have been the obvious choice, but there was no lifeguard on duty.

  There weren’t any neighbors I could talk to, either. And no one at school. Plus I kept thinking about Alexis’s warning: “If you say anything about this, he’ll kill us all.” What if she was right? What if I told someone and Ray went on a murderous rampage? With my luck, I’d survive, probably in a coma, and I’d lie in a hospital bed for the rest of my life, hooked up to all sorts of blipping, bleating monitoring devices, knowing I’d been responsible for the murders of my entire family.

  Whenever I tried to talk to Alexis about it, thinking that maybe together we could figure out how to get help, she would turn on me, furious. She seemed to have inherited my father’s propensity for rage—though of course she had the better claim to anger.

  Once we were all tucked in bed, though, her rage gave way to pain. She cried every night. Long and contagiously.

  One Sunday—an Easter Sunday, big day for Jesus and His pals—I heard her whimpering in her bed, trying to stifle her cries with her pillow. I got up and crawled under the covers next to her and held her close and tight. The ceiling fan was squeaking like a motherfucker. “I’m sorry,” I said, whispering. I was overwhelmed with guilt. Guilt, terror, pain—these were words I understood. Love? Not a fucking clue.

  Alexis stopped crying. Dried her tears with the back of her hands. Turned to look at me in the darkness.

  “Do you believe in God?” she asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess so.” It was an odd question coming from her. She was five years older than me. Surely she knew better.

  “I don’t believe that bullshit anymore,” she said. “If there was a God, why would he do this to me? What did I ever do to deserve this?”

  It was a good question. And it made me wonder: If there was a God, why didn’t he give me the courage to stop my father? Guilt guilt guilt.

  Sundays after church we’d come home and get out of our nice clothes and hit the mops and buckets. It was cleaning day. The girls and Mom and I ran around like a bunch of Cinderellas, making sure everything was spotless; Ray tended to the manly tasks—the leaky faucets, the squeaky hinges, the lawn. There he stood, gloating in his manhood, pausing now and then to step outside and wave and smile at a passing Stepford neighbor. Look at me. Ray Dickinson. Hell of a guy, huh?

  Late in the day he would come around to inspect our work. “Is this dust here?” “There are streaks in the mirror.” “I dropped a quarter on the bed and it hardly bounced at all.”

  He would pace, seething. He would look at each of us in turn, shaking his head, trying to impress upon us the depth of his disappointment. “When I ask you to do something, I expect you to do it right,” he’d bark. “Shape up or ship out.”

  And we’d go back and do it again. And again. And again. Scrubbing the floors, dusting, washing and rewashing windows so that to this day I jump when I hear the squeak of newspaper against glass. “You’re not finished here, girl,” he’d say. “I’m seeing streaks.” Grinning at me, that evil, lopsided grin. Daring me to say a word. Looking at me like he wanted me to sass him so he could beat my sorry ass.

  And I’d turn around and try again and think, Is this life? It couldn’t be.

  And then I’d think, God helps those who help themselves. And I wondered what that meant. What did God want from me?

  There was life outside the house, of course. And sometimes it actually felt normal; sometimes it actually felt good.

  I don’t know how I managed it; it wasn’t until years later that I heard about something called compartmentalizing—the ability to close one part of life off into a separate part of the brain, a compartment, to avoid having to live with it. And I’m pretty sure that’s what I did. I put the horror of home in a compartment and went out and tried to live a normal life. Apparently, it’s quite common among murderers.

  For obvious reasons, I spent as much time as possible away from the house. My best friend from the age of ten was Eric Salter. He lived a few blocks away, in a big place with a pool. He had very laid-back parents, stoned most of the time, and they let us neighborhood kids drift in and out of their home throughout the day. It’s not like you could talk to Eric’s parents, though; they were pretty self-absorbed, being high all the time. But they were decent and good-hearted. And they’d smile when they saw
me. I couldn’t believe it.

  In 1966, not long after I turned eleven, Alexis ran away from home. She was only seventeen, but she’d fallen in love with a GI and decided to move to Monterey to live with him.

  The day before she left, she took Debbie and me to the beach—Debbie, who was still so young—and sat us down and told us to stay away from Ray. “He’s evil,” she said. “An evil, terrible man. Don’t let him near you, understand?” She wanted to say more, but the words caught in her throat and she began to cry. “I’ll be right back,” she said, her lower lip quivering. She stood and walked off down the beach, trying to pull herself together, getting smaller and smaller. I looked over at little Debbie. She hadn’t understood a word. “Do you have money for ice cream?” she asked.

  The next day, Alexis was gone. I was crushed. Ray missed her, too, of course. He wasn’t getting serviced anymore. And the man loved his blow jobs.

  At night, as I lay in bed reading or trying to sleep, I would listen for his step. I heard it now. The Monster was on his way to bed. I heard him reach the landing, heard him turning toward the master bedroom, heard him stop. My heart beat like a motherfucker. He turned and made his way down the hall, approaching. His footfalls stopped outside my door. I couldn’t breathe.

  The door opened and I looked dead at him. He stood there staring at me. He smiled. He was trying to make it look like a warm, friendly smile.

  “What?” I said.

  “Why are you so hostile?” he said.

  I didn’t say anything. We stared at each other. He knew I’d kill him if he tried anything. Or die trying.

  “You are an ungrateful, ugly little animal,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You’ll never amount to anything.”

  He took another moment, staring, actively hating me, then shut the door and moved off, toward the master bedroom.