LITMIR.BIZ

      ONE IN FIVE¹

      Years passed, and just when it looked like things might be returning to normal I received the news that would turn our lives upside down again. It was a couple of months away from my fourteenth birthday, and I was home alone in Connecticut when the phone rang. It was my dad calling from the other side of the country.

      “Guess what? We’re moving to California.”

      I burst into tears. I was so upset because I finally had my own friends and something that resembled a regular life. I’d even started theater classes, and now we were moving. Again. He must have felt bad about my dramatic reaction, because at the end of the conversation he told me for the first time that he loved me. He wasn’t an emotionally demonstrative man, and the impact of that rare admission only made me cry more. I was settled in Connecticut. We had moved before and it hadn’t gone well. Now the very idea of leaving behind everything that I knew and loved felt both strange and overwhelming, like taking an unexpected voyage to another planet.

      The bad news was offset by my big dream that I would one day become a working actress. I imagined that our house would be near the San Gabriel Mountains with a view of the Hollywood sign, that my mom would take me to auditions, and that I’d be an overnight success.

      Also, there was one bad memory of Connecticut I wanted to escape. When I was in the eighth grade, my boyfriend Frank and some of his friends raided a liquor cabinet and drank Jack Daniels and vodka until they passed out. When the other boys woke up, they found Frank dead. He had choked on his own vomit and died during the night.

      So I’d learned, even at that young age, to stay well clear of hard liquor. My mother wasn’t a big drinker, and my father had quit drinking, so there weren’t bad role models around the house, but it seemed that with Patrick’s death at the hands of a drunk driver and my boyfriend’s death from overconsumption, the negative effects of alcohol abuse were beginning to haunt my life.

      Looking back, I can see that those ghosts weren’t done with me, not by a long shot. They would follow me across the country to my new life.

      We flew out to L.A., and by this time my dad must have been feeling really bad, because he felt he needed to butter us up with a trip to Disneyland. I had my fourteenth birthday in the Disneyland Hotel. We decided to celebrate by taking a tour of our new house at Nellie Gail Ranch. With a name like that I expected something similar to what we were used to in Connecticut: beautiful period homes, acres of woods, and little creeks and ponds.

      Nellie Gail Ranch turned out to be a cookie-cutter housing estate, a tract home development. Our house was in a little cul-de-sac. There was no lawn, it was the middle of summer and stinking hot, and only about 40 percent of the houses were inhabited. It was all new and sterile.

      The houses were demarcated by a kind of alphabetic apartheid. If you had a Plan C house you had more wealth and prestige than someone with a Plan B or Plan A. There was this ridiculous competitive element in the neighborhood.

      My disappointment grew when I figured out that Nellie Gail Ranch was in Orange County, a good hour on the 405 freeway from Hollywood, which meant that it might as well have been the moon.

      My mom was so sad there. Divorce was in the air. It didn’t manifest itself until I was eighteen and already long gone from the house but you could tell that my mom would never forgive my father for moving to Texas; their eventual breakup was a slow-moving, unavoidable avalanche. I used to try to cheer her up—I’d stick all these little frozen Tex-Mex delicacies in the microwave and then bring them out and serve them up like I was a robot, which always made her laugh.

      Not long after we moved my mom got a job, and then I pretty much became a latchkey kid. She was working at Saks Fifth Avenue in the swanky “designer salon,” which was great, because she was able to bring home beautiful clothes. But it meant that every day I’d come home from school to an empty house. Dad worked late, Jimmy had moved out of the house by the time I was twelve, and Vincent and I weren’t particularly chummy; our age difference of four years meant we didn’t have much in common. He was out studying all the time and worrying about what college he’d go to. I’d read or roller-skate around our little cul-de-sac wearing shorts and a tube top. I wasn’t a rambunctious child who needed lots of attention; I was a loner, which made it hard to work out how to fit into my new life.

      School only complicated the process. I attended Laguna Hills High for my freshman year. I felt completely out of place because I was from Connecticut and very tomboyish, and all the other girls dressed like hookers in tight jeans, high heels, and makeup. I quickly adapted and copied them. I could see that my parents were surprised; they wanted to know what had happened to their little girl in top-siders and polo shirts. I was in the midst of transforming from the awkward-looking fourth son with short hair and braces into a young woman.

      I went on my first proper date around that time with a young guy who picked me up in an old Dodge Dart. My brother Vince had a ball making fun of me because I wore a purple and red neon disco dress with Minnie Mouse high heels. I even had the Farrah Fawcett hairdo with the sausage curls down the sides and more eyeliner than Tammy Faye Bakker; it was just awful.

      The only other people who lived in our cul-de-sac lived right next door: an airline pilot, his Asian wife, and their three-year-old daughter. He used to come over and be buddy-buddy with my father, and I guess that in an innocent, adolescent way, I thought he was handsome.

      One day we were in our Jacuzzi with my father and he stuck his foot on my leg and started rubbing it up and down. It all happened under the bubbling water so you couldn’t see it. I thought that was really weird so I got out of the Jacuzzi and went inside.

      Not long after that I was walking home from school and he drew up beside me in his van and offered to drive me home. He was my neighbor, and anything was better than walking, so I jumped in. The van had a plaid interior, with horrible brown fabric on the seats and two little round bubble windows at the back. They were thick and opaque; you couldn’t see in or out of them. The second I closed the door I could tell he was drunk. He said he had to stop somewhere on the way home, and I didn’t argue. He pulled up outside a liquor store, and when he came back he handed me a can of Coke that had been spiked with booze.

      I felt pretty grown up, so I took a few sips and not long after started feeling really woozy. Maybe it was because I wasn’t used to drinking, or maybe he’d put something else in the can besides liquor. He drove to an empty parking lot, and the next thing I knew he stopped the car and made a move on me. I panicked and tried to push him away, but he was a big guy, 200 pounds and at least 6'1". He just grabbed me and threw me into the back of the van. I tried fighting him off but he pinned me down and sat on my arms and told me how much I wanted it.

      I knew how babies were made and I’d walked in once on my parents having sex, but there’s nothing that prepares you for a grown man crushing you with his weight, grunting, his face turning red, and realizing that you’re not strong enough to stop him.

      I caught sight of those bubble windows set into the back of the van and that’s when it occurred to me that no one could see me and that I might actually die. Another part of my brain was trying to rationalize things—this is my neighbor, he knows my parents, he can’t kill me, but if my parents find out they’ll kill him and probably me as well. That’s when I went limp, because I thought, “Oh boy, I don’t want to die in this van, I’d better get this over with.”

      He took my virginity. There was a little blood and a lot of pain. Then he drove back to Nellie Gail Ranch and dumped me outside the front of my house. He knew that neither of my parents would be home.

      It

Скачать книгу