Later that year, my mother, midbreakdown, let Mormon missionaries into our house, and they kept returning, bringing cookies and crafts. They helped me make a bottle of layered colored sand. Within a few months we became Mormon, or my mother did, and Ace and I tagged along, eager to keep her whole. I still remember some of the Mormon stories I paid half attention to in youth Bible study （Lehi’s dream of a happy fruit tree, some other guy’s two thousand invincible soldiers） and often can’t remember if something is from the Book of Mormon or the Bible I’d previously grown up with.
Not quite four years later, the April I was eleven and he was eighteen, my brother, high on more than one thing, either jumped off the roof of a shoe store or fell off, but in any case he lasted three days in a coma and then he left us. Then my mother fully lost it.
She—for example—would set the microwave to five minutes with nothing in it and sit in front of the door, watching the glass plate spin and spin. She didn’t notice when I cut my hair to ear length in the bathroom, didn’t notice when I stopped doing laundry, or began wearing Ace’s old clothes. She didn’t notice if I stayed home to watch Days of Our Lives, didn’t notice when the groceries expired, didn’t notice when I took cash from her purse to buy Wendy’s. She stopped showing up for work and from what I understood, we were living off my father’s life insurance.
In retrospect, I wonder how much the Mormons were helping. We were an easy sell, a sob story. A wealthier Mormon couple, the Robesons, had taken special interest in us, picking us up every Sunday for church, having us over for Monday-night dinners. They told me I should call them aunt and uncle, so I avoided saying their names at all. The Robesons had grown children, a house full of artificial flowers and little bowls of potpourri, soft pastel carpets in every room.
My mother needed to be hospitalized. It was obvious, and it was obvious I was the reason she wasn’t going. Not that her being home was healthy for me, either; by the beginning of eighth grade, my schoolwork had slipped along with my friendships and hygiene. I don’t know if I was clinically depressed, but the best way to survive my mother’s depression was to go numb, to match her silence and her disregard for cleanliness, for answering the phone, for making meals.
Severn Robeson had grown up outside Boston and attended Granby in the ’50s, sent his son and daughter there, too, and sponsored the occasional scholarship. The Robesons had a proposal: I would come live with them for the rest of eighth grade, pulling my grades up, while my mom got treatment. Then, as long as I could get into Granby—and they were certain I could, wink wink—they’d pay for tuition and room and board and books. I’d stay with them on breaks, until my mom was stable and home. Severn sang me “You Can’t Beat the Granby Dragons” to the tune of “You Can’t Ride in My Little Red Wagon.” He told me about the teacher who made him memorize ten Shakespeare soliloquies.
My idea of boarding school was mostly bits of The Facts of Life plus a dim impression of something gothic and fancy. The brochure, though, showed kids laughing over plates of fries. It showed tan, muscled teenagers playing tug-of-war, as if that were a regular pastime rather than （as I would learn） a forced orientation activity. Granby looked a lot better than Indiana. It looked like a school where people wouldn’t stick gum on your locker, where they wouldn’t find it hilarious to ask if your brother killed himself because you were fat.
When I left for school in the fall of ’91, my mother was in a residential program. She and two roommates had their own little house with a tiny kitchen. By Thanksgiving, she’d left for the Arizona desert with a man she’d met in group therapy. They made wind chimes and hand-bound books together. She flew back to Indiana and we had Thanksgiving with the Robesons and their kids and grandkids, and she talked the whole time about the Arizona sun, how the gloom up here was half her problem.
I stayed with her near Sedona that June, but I hated her faux-hippie boyfriend and the Airstream we were crammed in. She and I fought viciously, and I returned to Indiana a month early. By the time you got to know me, sophomore year, I fully lived at the Robesons’， spent vacations hiding in my room or perched with a book on their velveteen sofa hoping no one would make small talk. I’d go to church with them because I felt obliged. They pressured me only gently to get baptized, and didn’t disown me when I declined. They’d ask about my mother as if I were in touch with her beyond the occasional postcard. You’re so much better off with me out of the way, she wrote on one of them.
To other students, I called the Robesons my aunt and uncle; for more official purposes I called them foster parents. But neither term covered the guest room aspect of the whole thing, the way Margaret Robeson would slip in to make my bed when I was in the shower, the relief we all felt when their son, Ammon, came home with his twins and I had a role to play, corralling them in front of Disney movies for five dollars an hour.
Fran knew all this; I told her in pieces as our friendship jelled over the course of freshman year. First I told her my father and brother were both dead, one death causing the drug problem that caused the other, tragedy breeding tragedy. Fran’s older sister Liza, who’d just spent a year in Japan, had taught us to make matcha with a bamboo whisk, and we’d sit in the Hoffnungs’ kitchen （stacks of ungraded tests, the fish tank right on the table surrounded by ancient New Yorkers, a half-finished cake always on the counter） getting caffeinated until my checkin. This was winter, when I didn’t have to rise at four a.m. for crew. I told Fran the details of my father’s death, playing with the whisk as I answered her follow-up questions. I’d never answered anyone’s questions before, not even the gentle Mormon therapist the Robesons had found me.
I told her he’d been drunk that night, not a typical state of affairs. The bar he owned was generic, neon-signs-in-the-windows, and my brother worked for him that summer, serving fried onions and fried cheese in red plastic baskets. My brother asked for an advance on his pay, and my father refused—although he’d granted the same to other employees. They argued out on the back deck after closing as Ace cleaned the grill. My father, not falling-down drunk but drunk, said things that triggered a fifteen-year-old with temper problems, and my brother yelled and my father yelled and my father pushed my brother and my brother jabbed him with the grill brush he was holding—not a spatula, forgive my poetic license—and my father fell back over the low railing and down eight feet to the rocky slope below, his head landing hard. An inch to the side and he’d have been fine, but as things were, he was knocked unconscious—and Ace was not yet panicked enough, when he phoned 911 from behind the bar, to merit the paramedics hurrying. By the time they arrived, my father had hemorrhaged beyond saving. He died in the ambulance.
Fran didn’t share any of her own confidences in exchange for mine, but listened attentively and formed opinions about things like my mother’s boyfriend’s horrible ponytail and the Robesons’ family game night and whether I could avoid church that summer and whether my mother would melt down further in Arizona （I thought so） or heal （Fran’s optimistic take）。 Fran didn’t come out until freshman year at Reed, so she wasn’t about to tell me about her burning crush on Halle Berry, or the turmoil she endured at a school where even her second ear piercing was nonconformist.