Read Online Fiction Ruined My Family by Jeanne Darst - Free Book Online

“projects” until you’re about ready to throw your sandwich at their heads? Dad’s artistic struggle, our financial high-wire act, meant that we were, I was, building character. Whatever the fuck that was. Their marriage seemed blighted. But they expected a hell of a lot from us. My mother was a stay-in-bed mom and my father was a stay-at-home writer, so I couldn’t help thinking, Why do I have to work so hard when you people sit around and drink coffee all day and pretend to do things?
    These two layabouts demanded top performance in school, and socially we were supposed to be charming, entertaining, and “presentable.” If I had it right, I was supposed to have the manners of Tracy Lord from The Philadelphia Story and the mind of Murray Kempton. You couldn’t let your mouth hang open otherwise you’d look apish; a straight back was crucial, no gum chewing, but smoking cigs was well, there were worse things a teenager could do. Manners were everything, unless some investment banker at a cocktail party, some Solomon Brothers jackass, glanced at his watch as you talked about your novel outline, in which case it was okay to call him a horse’s ass, and definitely not out of line to throw a drink in his face. Growing up, I thought throwing a drink in someone’s face was the most natural thing in the world. You like someone? Ask him what you can get him to drink. Dislike someone? Throw a drink in his face. And yet our table manners—using the right fork, knowing the right way to cut meat, the right way to lean the fork at the top of the plate when you were finished—were constantly scrutinized. Now, if you wanted to stab someone in the temple with that fork during dinner, that was fine, just for heaven’s sake know where to place the bloody fork on your plate when you were through.
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    WHAT MY FATHER PRESSED upon me even more than his family being an old St. Louis family was the fact that we were also, as far as he could trace our ancestral beginnings, not math people. I remember my mother reading aloud from the New York Times science section about right-brain/left-brain theories. She loved to identify with right brainers, to distance herself from “lefties” (engineers, lawyers, people who could add 7 plus 6 and come up with 13) as much as possible. It seemed to me growing up that my mother used the number forty-five so often (“I’ve asked you forty-five times to pick up your room,” “That dog has pooped under the dining room table forty-five times this week”) simply because it was one of the few numbers she knew. If there was one area of their marriage that was quite strong it was their mutual disapproval of math. They did the best they could to keep math out of our house and it may have been, for us, the subject non grata even more than God. They were more than happy to discuss and many times actually do my schoolwork for me if they found the subject matter lively enough. When I studied Greek and Roman history in Mr. Shaw’s sixth-grade class my dad built me a Trojan horse and my mom had painstakingly fashioned a gorgeous clay Julius Caesar figurine with a knife sticking out of his chest and twenty-three plops of Heinz ketchup around his body on the steps of the Senate building indicating the twenty-three times Caesar was stabbed. My dad wrote plenty of papers for me. He showed real promise on a ten-pager about Saint Thomas Aquinas, but usually he got terrible grades at Bronxville High School, where his obscure and plentiful high literary references—from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to a Voltaire pun to the thick of Faulkner—usually lost teachers. That, or they couldn’t pass my father’s lack of a decent five-paragraph funnel essay. But I was still expected to pass math class.
    When summer school in algebra became a distinct possibility, my parents hired the Harvard-bound daughter of their only