Bad Daughter, Part One

Los Angeles CA

This is how it’s done:

Start with a lie.

Fake some sort of vague illness, especially one that might kill you. Make it dramatic, clutch your stomach, blame the cafeteria food. Anything to avoid seventh grade algebra. The girl who sits in front of you is having seizures—not tiny, barely noticeable seizures, but full-on scary-as-fuck seizures. After the first one the teacher explains it’s OK everybody, Lisa has epilepsy, but it’s too late. To witness a shark attack would have been less traumatizing. When you run out of nonexistent maladies stop going to class altogether, choosing instead to wander the halls like a confused foreign exchange student. Nobody will notice. You are invisible.

Fail to tell your parents. Fail algebra. They have questions, because you’re actually great at algebra, but you’d rather not discuss it. Tell them you might have polio and you need to go to bed.

Your parents worry about you, wonder if they should put you back on Ritalin. Their worry feels noose-like. Get the sense you’re being ganged-up on. Threaten to run away, but then don’t because you’re not allowed to and you hate being in trouble. Instead, read books about other people in trouble, like Go Ask Alice, a story about a girl who does a bunch of acid and then dies. Say to your twelve-year-old self, that’ll never be me.

Of course it won’t. You’re too smart. You’ve been told this many times, and everyone knows a good brain will get you far in life so they implore you to apply yourself, Anne, you’ve got so much potential! They are a gang of two, constantly hammering you about your potential. They belong in matching track suits.

Roll your eyes. Look bored.

Begin to suspect you were adopted.

Your mother says she was asleep when she had you—which only adds to your theory, since it sounds like an awfully flimsy excuse for a birth story—but really, she was in a morphine haze. That’s how they did it in the 60’s, before women started burning bras and demanding to be seen as something other than baby incubators. The mothers were given morphine along with some other amnesia-inducing drug, and with no awareness or memory of the birth had drowsy little drug babies. Then the rest of the 60’s happened and pretty much everyone was on drugs anyway, living in communes and having sex with Charles Manson.

Men were not allowed to watch or participate in the birthing process, so your dad was in the waiting room, probably chain smoking, maybe even with the doctor. Bored, he goes home halfway through to take a nap and is nowhere to be found when your mother wakes up. She wants to name you Cherry, but your dad channels all of humanity says no, that’s ridiculous, so they name you Anne, as if you are destined to become a queen. When people get it wrong, they say Amy. Literally none of these names suit you.

Your first day of school, your mother loses her mind. When she drops you off she crushes you in a hug, tears in her eyes, not wanting to let you go. Stomp off and don’t look back. In the future she will laugh every time she tells this story, but you know she doesn’t mean it.

You won’t always be so gung-ho about school, especially not after the whole seizure thing. Switch to a different, fancier school. Now you wear a uniform and curl your hair like a Charlie’s Angel. Your brother John turns 16 and—because he’s responsible, Anne, maybe you should try it—gets your dad’s ’68 Cougar. Crash that car five years later on your way to get a Slurpee, then apologize like, a billion times even though everyone is way too pissed to hear it and to top it off now the insurance rates are going to go up and seriously, Anne, why can’t you be more like your brother.

They have a point. John is the best of your parents, but cooler, as if the DNA from both of them fused together the moment of his conception and then one-upped itself. You are obsessed with him, with being his little sister. The Joanie to the Richie. You balance each other: You are the younger, ungrounded one, the problem child who can’t wait to go out into the world and start making trouble. He is the older one, solid and consistent, an Everlasting Gobstopper of a human.

This is your family. Go to Hawaii together, frolic in the cobalt water, eat poi. It’s heaven.

Feel super lucky, because you are. You have a happy home, friends and access to R-rated movies thanks to the recent availability of cable TV. You’re like an adult. If you could afford food and rent with babysitting money, you’d probably just move out. And not look back.

On a Halloween night eat candy with your dad and watch The Exorcist, the scariest fucking movie ever made and the reason for your aversion to relics. (Yes, you know they’re inherently harmless. But that Pazuzu thing looks like it’ll eat your face.) You share a love of horror, your dad and you. There’s nothing like watching little possessed Regan speak in tongues and stab herself in the crotch with a crucifix. It connects you, like a terrifying in-joke.

Turn thirteen. Start doing stupid shit for no reason, like stealing your dad’s cigarettes, running out to the backyard and daring yourself to smoke them until you throw up. Nobody tells you this will happen, but your barely-teenage body probably doesn’t know what the hell else to do with the sudden onslaught of poison so what do you expect. Keep this routine up for months before you finally get caught, at which point your dad—the smoker—gives you a lengthy and somewhat tedious lecture about the evils of smoking and how it will stunt your growth. Clearly this is a fallacy, considering you grew up to be five foot eight, but without a leg to stand on he had to come up with something that sounded remotely threatening other than the likelihood of developing black lung because we were all going to get that anyway thanks to smog. In some countries cigarette packs come with photos of actual mouth cancer and people still smoke, so if the most disgusting deterrent in the world doesn’t work, you’re guessing nothing will.

So there it is. Not your fault.

Nothing ever is.

Next.

Kiss boys. Fall in love with all of them. Fall out of love with all of them. Sure enough, they will do the same with you. Assume correctly this pattern will not end, ever, and that it was in fact invented by Satan. Blame your parents for making it all look so freakin’ easy.

The Clendenings met in 1958-ish, about five minutes after he graduated from law school, just before he went into the Air Force, and married in 1959. In their wedding photos they look like movie stars, a non-gay Cary Grant with his blushing young bride in head-to-toe lace. At twenty-three, she had her shit together enough to know exactly what she wanted: marriage and kids. That was it. Other mothers worked, or weirdly went on vacations alone, but yours didn’t. She loved her life, and never once complained it wasn’t enough. It never once occurred to you it was.

You want more. It is the wanting of a thirteen-year-old who knows nothing.

Annnd… next.

Start to drink.

(Don’t act surprised, you guys. You knew this was coming.)

The fact that you’re only thirteen doesn’t matter. Tatum O’Neal was like, six when she started drinking and she ended up winning an Oscar, so if we’re looking at the situation on a curve you’d already be way behind. The point is, one day out of nowhere you pull a bottle of Cutty Sark out of the liquor cabinet, take a little sippy-poo and suddenly, things are never the same.

At first, the shift is subtle: you’re still you, but with a secret. It feels adult and irreversible. Keep it a secret—you’re a Scorpio, you’d rather light yourself on fire than admit to anything you don’t want to. Later in life this kind of thinking will backfire on you, but right now feel electrified by it because drinking makes you feel like a god. You’re a different you, a better you, a smarter, prettier, more giggly you. Make no mistake, drinkers are Sybils. There’s always a new personality waiting to emerge.

People will ask you why you did it, but you honestly don’t know. You didn’t have a shitty childhood, nobody was getting divorced and you never got left at the zoo. This is how you know not everything in life happens for a reason and anyone who says otherwise has probably seen the movie Amélie too many times.

Add water to liquor bottles. Hide empty beer cans in your slippers. Drink alone. Your brother’s friends are over—drink with them. The dogs will be witnesses to all this, but you will swear them to secrecy. They willingly bear the burden. Drink more.

No, it’s not a great idea, and no, you don’t care.

Spend a lifetime wondering why not.

This is the first of three parts. Read part two here.