Over the Top Page 4

  Really, the whole office looked like it was ripped out of a scene from Mad Men: It had old-school vending machines, sofas with vermouth-colored leather, corporate-looking boardrooms, and black-and-white-spotted marble stairs and the oldest revolving door in Illinois, which I thought was extremely special—until some jackass decided to have it removed. Why don’t you just take a dump on this building’s history while you’re at it? I really loved that revolving door! As did a lot of other people in my town!

  Beyond that, there wasn’t much that made Quincy remarkable, other than the fact that the guy who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima was from Quincy. So was this golfer named D. A. Weibring. And Quincy played host to a debate between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in 1854, which, mixed with a multitude of other events, ultimately led to Lincoln becoming president. Also, Steven Spielberg was rumored to have visited Quincy because his wife’s aunt was married to a Quincy business owner! OMG, can you even? For many years, the World Free Fall Convention was held there, but so many people kept dying during the event’s skydives that the insurance became too high to keep it going. Until it was canceled, it was the talk of the town: The Today Show came, honey! That was our claim to fame.

  During the 1994 World Free Fall Convention, my mom called us from work. She was coming home and in a Helen-Hunt-in-Twister-level panic.

  “Get up! Put on some clothes! We gotta go!” she yelled.

  My brothers got up, too, looking bleary and confused. We all pulled on our neon Umbro shorts, high-top socks, and sneakers.

  It was a muggy July day and already the midmorning was steaming. We stopped at the house next door, where my mom showed us the newspaper sitting on the doorstep. There, on the front page, was a photo taken of a guy who had been skydiving the previous day—only between his shorts, you could see one of his exposed testicles. Nobody had caught it. Now we had to retrieve every paper that had already been delivered. We spent the morning running all over town, scooping papers from front yards, holding them hostage until the reprint was finished.

  A few testicle-printed papers might have fallen through the cracks, but somehow, nobody complained about indecency.

  * * *

  I saw the way my mom handled the shit out of the free-balling situation and I took that fierceness to heart. I wanted to be just like her. Even now, my mom and I are so alike. We look alike. We act alike. We both have a quick sense of humor. She can light up a room and, just as quickly, turn deadly serious. She’s passionate, asks a lot of questions, and gets her hands dirty. If you’re not putting in the level of intensity that my mom is, she will let you know.

  I can see her now, at one of the T-ball games that I begrudgingly played in for one year. The other boys were wearing shorts, but I was wearing brightly colored gymnastics tights. And there was my mom, in an emerald-green high-waisted pencil skirt, a green-and-white vertical-striped blouse with big gold buttons, bright tangerine low-cut leather heels, ultrawide shoulders, and an ultrawide perm.

  Because she was the daughter of the CEO of our family’s company, she had to fight so hard to be taken seriously. People suspected nepotism, which meant she had to work twice as hard for half the respect, and double the hours without the title she deserved, even as she ran circles around people.

  Before I quit Boy Scouts, I had wanted to hang out with the other boys—like Rustalav, who was heterosexual Sporty Spice, the best at soccer and pretty much the coolest boy’s boy. He had invited all the other Boy Scouts from school over for a playdate except for me. My mom had to call and ask his mother, “Can Jack come over?” It happened in front of me, and I remember so clearly how she had to make it seem like I had been welcome all along, and it wasn’t weird that I was the only one who wasn’t there.

  She did such a good job of making it seem like things were always fine. No matter how persistent the bullying or frequent the social slightings and disappointments, my mom always tried to help me through it. She never made me feel weirder or worse about myself and I never ever had to question her love and acceptance of me on a human level. Which is something I feel like I must not ever take for granted. My mom accepted me completely when so many others couldn’t.

  My dad had called her “Padlock Mary,” because she is a big fan of feeling safe and secure. After they got divorced, Mom would come grab us three boys for these family sleepovers where she would wedge a chair underneath her bedroom door to keep potential home intruders out. She loved having eighteen thousand locks on the door. Très Panic Room chic.

  Could my mom’s paranoia have come from the time I saved my friend Malvina’s life? It was just me, Malvina, and a lemonade stand when a Jim-Carrey-in-Ace-Ventura-looking villain came walking down the street and told Malvina he had puppies at home and she could see them if she came with him. I stood up and pounded my hands on the table, sending lemonade Dixie cups flying everywhere. I started barking at him like a rabid dog. Then I started screaming for Malvina’s mom. She came running out. “What the hell are you doing?” she screamed. He ran off. They called the police and ended up finding him on Main Street. Nobody was getting kidnapped on my watch.

  Not to say that I’m a genius, but I literally remember their home phone number because I used to have to call to jump on their trampoline and play on their monkey bars every single day. Malvina taught me how to play American Gladiator on the monkey bars by swinging back and forth and trying to use our legs as claws to rip each other down. We also invented a fierce game where we would pull the trampoline below the roof and jump from the roof onto the trampoline into the swimming pool. We never got hurt until one fateful day when we were, like, “Oh my God, you know what would be great? Let’s take this folding gymnastics mat, put it near the top of this extremely steep staircase in your circa-1800s house, lie on our stomachs on the mat, and zoom down the stairs. What could go wrong?” Well, the lip of the mat caught the edge of the stairs. We were airborne. What ended our rapid descent down the half-story fall was actually Malvina’s wrist creating a cushion betwixt my skull and the wall behind me. As we crumpled to the ground, we were, like, “Oh, thank God we’re not bleeding!” Until we looked down and saw what looked like an elbow sticking out of Malvina’s wrist—a severe right angle where there shouldn’t be one. “What in the Sam hell is going on here?” her mother shrieked as she came bounding around the corner. The crash had woken her up from a hard-core-REM-cycle midday nap. I was exiled from Malvina’s house for all of six hours. It was devastating. But family friends are family friends, and we still totally had our graduation party together ten years later.

  All to say, I didn’t cause that much havoc. Who knew why my mom was so nervous?

  Just like Mom, I also had an irrational fear of the I-70 killer from Unsolved Mysteries, the Unabomber, police sketches, and A-ha’s “Take On Me” music video. Reader, it strikes me that maybe my family does have a deep-seated sense of anxiety that runs in our bones. Maybe it was that we were all sensing the inevitable collapse of print media and the pressure to roll our family business into something more productive.

  But we found ways to have fun in the midst of all the stress. In the grocery store, we would play Supermarket Sweep, one of the most beloved game shows of the early ’90s. “You have forty-five seconds to find the 2 percent milk!” my mom would say, and I’d be sprinting down the aisle in search of the refrigerated section.

  Because my mom could make everything fun, I wanted her attention all the time. I would call from school and pull her out of meetings to talk on the phone, or tell her about the steal of round-trip tickets to Helsinki, Finland, I’d found out about from calling travel agents, or a sale on guinea pigs at the local pet store, or just that I’d forgotten something that she’d have to bring to me at school—my violin, or the clothes I needed for swim team. I’d run out to meet her at the car in front of the school and find the security officer scolding her for her irresponsible driving in a school zone.

  My parents were committed to this gorgeous amicable divorce narrativ
e, telling us kids that they’d gotten divorced for “grown-up reasons.” It wasn’t until I was sixteen, and in the peak of teenage angst, that I would find out the truth about what had caused the divorce: My mom had received an anonymous letter in the mail shortly before Christmas saying, Honey, and I’m paraphrasing here, your husband is a damn skank who takes his side piece on business trips. He’s been going down to the river and having a torrid affair with a tanning-bed-act, bad-perm-having, homewrecking bitch named Tashaya.

  Tashaya.

  She was actually probably really nice and had just believed my dad’s lies. As my uncle Pyeter said, nobody was in the bedroom besides those two—so don’t make judgments. My dad was probably only being a skank at this time because he had been pressured into this marriage in the first place when he and my mom got knocked up. In the early ’80s, if you made the choice to get preggers, then you were getting married. Or at least that was how it went in my family. Totally made for a thriving . . . divorce.

  Mary wasn’t having any of it. She bundled us up, took us to my uncle’s, and put that divorce right in motion, while also shielding me and my brothers from the ugly parts.

  Most of the ultradramatic stories I didn’t hear about until much later. My most favorite of all time: My dad had moved out after the divorce and bought the smallest house on the block, just seven doors away from my mom’s. It helped make his Wednesday night father-son time easier. It also gave her no distance from the drama.

  My mom went out for happy hour for the first time postdivorce with her colleagues. She drove past my dad’s house at about seven thirty on the way home from said happy hour because, you see, my mom was a fierce bitch and she didn’t put up with no shit.

  Lo and behold, she saw a car that belonged to another woman she knew in the driveway. (It wasn’t even fucking Tashaya, mind you.) All the lights inside my dad’s house were already off. At seven thirty! So much for his important midweek father-son time.

  Unbeknownst to my six-year-old self, probably already passed out in a bunk bed after watching Power Rangers reruns, my mom straight up stop, dropped, and rolled out of the car. “Fuck it!” she said, as she opened up the front door to my dad’s house to find him and his new girl in an intimate, half-naked embrace on the couch. My mom escorted this woman off the couch like a suitcase and threw her out, in her underwear, then went back inside and prevailed in a verbal assault that, while unhealthy, was necessary for my dad to see the scorn of a woman’s broken heart.

  The next morning, my mom woke up with a deep hailstorm-cloud-colored feeling in her heart. She couldn’t believe that she had acted so barbarically. She realized that the woman she’d attacked was a manager at a local supermarket’s flower store. When she arrived at the parking lot, she could deduce what car the woman drove because she could still see the handprints and streak marks on the driver’s-side window as the woman had sped away for her life while my mom punched, smacked, and hacked at her car. Have I mentioned that Mary’s a fierce bitch?

  My mom strode into County Market with the poise and grace of Julia Roberts in the iconic black lace dress from Pretty Woman. She gave the woman a card, telling her that she’d had a couple drinks at happy hour and had lost her damn mind. And woman to woman—could she ever forgive her?

  The woman obliged. They hugged it out. And a lady-on-lady trauma was healed.

  Postdivorce, we couldn’t afford to continue living in the house I’d grown up in, which was a ’60s split-level modern moment—she was cute, but out of our price range—so my mom’s parents said, “Let’s swap.” We moved into the house that my mom had grown up in, and my grandparents moved into our house. Que convenient!

  We lived next door to Sabina and Borya: Sabina made gorgeous fudge, Borya had a gorgeous koi pond in his backyard, and Malvina Mikhailov lived down the street. I was thriving. When my dad came to pick us up for Wednesday night and every other weekend custody sessions, I would contort myself into all sorts of positions—like in an octagon end table, to disguise myself so my dad wouldn’t be able to take me. Or I’d hide in the basement for as long as possible. I didn’t love going to my dad’s house. It just didn’t feel like home. Mainly because he had terrible snacks.

  After we’d moved into the new-old house, one afternoon we were out shopping at the local Kmart when my mom stopped the shopping cart and turned to face us. “I’m going to introduce you to my friend Steve,” she said.

  We got in the car and made exactly three turns—I remember it like yesterday, honey—down the streets of Quincy, past the house we lived in, pulled into a subdivision, and came to a stop. My mom rolled down the driver’s-side window. The front door of the house opened and I saw a man approaching the car, dancing to the beat of “La Cucaracha,” only there was no music. He did a step-touch, step-touch with his feet as he shimmied and gyrated in a salsa-style fashion toward the car. He was sunburnt shades of orange, red, and violet. You know the opaque light-blue-sky-colored gummy bear that’s not translucent? She’s kind of turquoise-jewelry colored? His shorts were that color. He was super bald, with wisps of bright blond hair, and very tall—six foot four. He was wearing a local basketball competition T-shirt, size XXL, and flip-flops.

  He came up to the window and said, “Uhhhhhhhh, hi, boys.” A long pause. “My name is Steve.”

  I hated him instantly.

  After all, I had never been a fan of men in positions of authority. What reason did I have to be? They were always ripping me out of my gowns, tearing Barbies out of my hands, and telling me I wasn’t allowed to express myself. It was basically The Parent Trap, and Steve was Meredith Blake, only I didn’t have a twin.

  Seven-year-old me had no idea that the man I just met was someone who would change the course of my life forevs.

  Steve started spending more time with my mom, and pretty soon he was sleeping over. Which I now realize is false, as my mom sent me the following note when I had her read all of this to make sure she was comfortable with the level of disclosure in this book. This note is so hilarious I had to include it.

  From my mom:

  I have an issue with saying “Steve started sleeping over.” Never once did he sleep over when you guys were in the house. He did insist, from a parenting perspective, that you stop sleeping in my room—he didn’t think that was healthy for you.

  So essentially all of that meant I wasn’t allowed to sleep in my mom’s room anymore, which was a big problem for me. At the time, there was this villain on Days of Our Lives who always wore this very dramatic pink-and-white suit, and she had come back from the dead. My brothers had made me watch the episode, and that old Miami Vice outfit–wearing monster had been haunting my dreams. She had icy blue eyes and was most definitely lying in wait beneath my bed, just waiting to slash my ankles, snatching away my chances at Olympic glory before killing me for my youthful skin. Sleeping next to my mom was the only way I felt safe. But now when I ran up to the door of my mom’s bedroom from a nightmare, it would be locked.

  “We’re talking!” I’d hear my mom yell through the door. It took me until I was thirty to realize that “We’re talking!” was actually code for doing adult horizontal bed choreography well beyond your young years. Which, gross! I’m glad they were getting their rocks off, but collective human trauma: Must our parents have sex? Accepting this reality is a level of wokeness I aspire to—knowing that your parents are sexual creatures and it’s actually not gross. Just uncomf.

  Back to my mom’s email notes on the book. She says:

  We did in the early evening, after dinner, go up to my room to “talk” or watch TV because you guys wanted to watch the TV in the family room.

  Maybe Magdalena was haunting a day-nap dream, or it happened early evening. Thanks for fact-checking, Mom!

  Anyway, as I later found out, Steve had been a very sought-after hot piece in his day. Ever since she could remember, my mom told me, she had a crush on a handsome boy with a wildly fun reputation, with blond hair and bright blue eyes and a sick body
—he was a contender for the most popular boy in school. He went to University of Kansas, where he started to go a bit off course with some heavy alcohol use and questionable decisions. By the time he’d bought a bar back in Quincy, he hadn’t quite become part of the cartel, but he didn’t not let people sell drugs at the bar (which according to him was totally false and there was no drug dealing happening from his business, but it was definitely the rumor around town).

  Finally he moved to the Virgin Islands to get sober, where he became Maureen O’Hara’s house sitter and would eventually start the first AA chapter in a prison in the Virgin Islands. There’s a blockbuster trilogy of novels’ worth of material that Steve could write about this chapter of his life, but that story isn’t mine to tell. Five years after, between Hurricane Hugo wiping the island out and Quincy being in the midst of the flood of 1993, which was massive, he had some property he needed to come back to salvage, so back to Quincy he came. My mom ran into him while they were out to dinner separately, creamed her pants since he was her lifelong crush, and the rest was history.

  Even though he had a little potbelly and was more than halfway to becoming a bear, my mom still saw him the way she did when she was a little girl—the handsome jock who was the king of Quincy. (To be clear, “bear” is a big hairy gay man, and Steve wasn’t gay, but that was the aesthetic.) They’d grown up two football fields away from each other; Steve had had a Jeep, and he was taking it around the block for a joyride when he saw my mom playing in her front yard. He took her for a ride around the block and she could still remember the way he looked that day, so athletic and all-American. Then, twenty-five years later, they ended up together.