LITMIR.BIZ

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with us when I was a toddler, and I have memories of my mother not wanting to leave me alone in the bathroom with him. Later, there was talk of sexual abuse. Like me, my dad was raised in a home full of secrets.

      Danny graduated from Roswell High a year before Ginny, and when he left to go to college in Pennsylvania, she felt insecure—even more so when she found out he had a female “roommate.” So she did what she would continue to do throughout their relationship whenever she felt a threat: she started seeing another guy to make him jealous. She took up with Charlie Harmon, a strapping young fireman whose family had moved to New Mexico from Texas. She even married him, though the union was short-lived, because the romance had the desired effect: Dad came running back. She divorced Charlie, and my parents got married in February 1962. I was born nine months later. Or so I thought.

      WHEN PEOPLE HEAR “Roswell,” they think of little green men, but nobody talked about UFOs at my house. The Roswell of my early childhood was a military town. We had the biggest landing strip in the United States (it served as a backup strip for the space shuttle) at Walker Air Force Base, which closed in the late sixties. Besides that, there were pecan orchards, alfalfa fields, a fireworks store, a meatpacking plant, and a Levi’s factory. We were enmeshed in Roswell, very much a part of the fabric of the community. And our families were intertwined, so much so that my cousin DeAnna is also my aunt. (She is my mom’s niece and married my dad’s youngest brother.)

      Mom had a much younger sister, Charlene—we called her Choc—who was a cheerleader at the high school. Ginny took on the role of chaperone, and I became the team’s miniature mascot. She would do things like sneak the whole squad into the drive-in by letting them lie in a giggly pile in the trunk of her car. I felt like I was one of the big girls—in on their shenanigans. They would dress me up in a matching uniform, and Ginny would do my hair. At school assemblies, I was the big reveal: running out in my little powder-blue outfit to finish the cheer, complete with the signature move they taught me, the ceremonial flipping of the bird. It was my first taste of being a performer, and I reveled in every second of it. And I loved seeing how happy it made my mother.

      In those days, my dad was working in advertising for the Roswell Daily Record. In the morning he would leave my mom a pack of cigarettes and a dollar bill, which she spent on a great big Pepsi that she bought from the corner store and nursed all day long. My dad was driven to succeed: he worked hard, and he played hard—sometimes too hard. He would go out carousing with one of my uncles, and they were the kind of drinkers who got into fights. (Keep in mind: they were barely twenty.) It was not uncommon for my dad to come home pretty banged up after one of these benders. He loved fighting, and he loved watching people fight. When I was little—way too little—my dad would take me to watch local boxing matches with him. I remember being about three and standing on top of a chair peering into the ring. I asked my dad, “What color trunks do I root for?” Watching two men pummeling each other: that was our bonding time.

      Both my parents had what you might call a relaxed relationship with the truth, but I think Dad actually got joy out of feeling he could get one over on someone. He would go to pay a check, for example, and say to the guy at the cash register, “I’ll flip you: double or nothing.” It was the gambler in him, always looking to get away with whatever he could. I didn’t have the words for it then, but his recklessness made me anxious. I was always on guard, on the alert for whether somebody was going to get angry. I have a vague memory of a man showing up at our house and pounding on the door when I was four, and of how terrified I was not knowing what was happening or why, but feeling the fear in my house. It was probably someone my dad had scammed. Or maybe he’d slept with the guy’s wife.

      I was almost five when my brother, Morgan, was born, and I felt protective of him right away. I was always tougher than him. He’s a big guy now—six feet three inches and strong—but he was tiny as a kid, and so pretty people always assumed he was a girl. He was a fussy baby, and my mother indulged him: “Just give the baby what he wants!” was her singsong refrain. I remember on one very long drive to go visit my aunt in Toledo when Morgan was around two, my parents passed me a bottle of beer from the front seat, which I slowly administered to him all the way to our destination, the way you’d give a baby a bottle of milk. Needless to say, by the time we got out of the car, he wasn’t screaming anymore.

      I’m not saying I was the perfect sister: my nickname for Morgan was, after all, “Butthole.” (One of my favorite forms of torture was to pin him down, fart into my hand, and hold it over his nose.) But I had a clear sense from early on that I had to look out for him—for both of us, really, because ours were not exactly helicopter parents. Once, when Morgan was three or four, he was standing on the back of the couch, looking out the window, and jumping, and I remember saying to my mother, “He’s going to fall and hurt himself!” He did, of course, and I tried to catch him, but I was too small. I broke his fall, but I couldn’t stop him from cracking his head open on the coffee table. It was like a scene out of a movie: my mom jumping up and yelling, “Don’t move!,” and wrapping his bleeding head in a towel before we rushed him to the hospital. He had fractured his skull, and for a long time after they stitched him up he looked like Frankenstein’s monster.

      Soon after he was born we left Roswell for California, the first of a series of moves that would define our childhood. My mother figured out that my dad was having an affair, so she did what she’d been taught to do by her mother when your husband is fooling around: she got him away from “the problem.” It did not seem to occur to the women in my family that if you took your cheating husband along when you left, the problem came with you wherever you went.

      For most people, the idea of moving is a big deal. All that change; having to find a new place to live; the hassle and stress of setting up life and finding a new doctor and dry cleaner and grocery store—not to mention getting your kids settled in new schools and figuring out the school bus route and so on. It would require a lot of thought and preparation and planning.

      That’s not how it was for us. My brother and I have calculated that throughout our childhoods, we attended at least two new schools a year, and it was often more than that. I didn’t realize until much later that this wasn’t how everybody lived. When I hear about people who’ve had the same friends since kindergarten, I can’t imagine what that must be like.

      Moving wasn’t dolled up for us kids. There would be a mounting sense that something was going on, a plan was being hatched, and the next thing I knew we’d be hitting the road in one of the many earth-toned vehicles my parents had over the years: the rust-colored Maverick, the brown Pinto, the beige Ford Falcon. (They were all brand new, except for my dad’s prized ’55 baby-blue Chevy Bel Air.) It was often presented as a necessity: Dad was so good at what he did—and he was good at what he did—that they needed him at another paper in another town. Our job was to support him. In those early years, moving didn’t feel like a big deal or a hardship. It was just what we did.

      I WAS HOSPITALIZED for my kidneys a second time when I was eleven, and coincidentally or not, it was right after one of my father’s affairs. Of course, at the time, I didn’t know in any literal way that my dad was cheating, yet I can’t help but wonder if my kidney flare-ups weren’t my body’s way of expressing what was going on at home. It was a Band-Aid, but for a while at least, it put the focus back on our family.

      Ironically, at that point things had seemed unusually settled: we’d moved back to Roswell a few years earlier, and it had felt like coming home. We lived in a sweet three-bedroom ranch; I had my own room, with a pink canopy bed and a matching bedspread. Morgan shared his room with my dad’s little brother George. (George had been living with us since I was five—as peripatetic as my parents were, they had taken him in without hesitation when my paternal grandmother died and he had no other place to go. He was like a big brother to me.) We’d made friends with the four kids who lived across the street, and we went back and forth between the two houses seamlessly—it was the first time we’d been in one place long enough for me to make friends I can really remember.

      I was walking home from school one day when I felt a strange heat spreading through my body. The skin on my belly and my cheeks was getting tighter and tighter. I rushed to the bathroom and pulled down my pants to check my “cookie,” but this time I was swelling

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