Read Online Fiction Ruined My Family by Jeanne Darst - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jeanne Darst
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unscrupulous. My sisters could very well opt for: ham-handed, moochy, and dragon-breathed. If the question was posed to my boyfriend, heâd probably lean toward flat-chested, thoughtless and pretty. My friends would go for daring! hilarious! and INSANE! Sit me in that admissions directorâs assistantâs internâs office chair today and I might choose wrinkleless, goal-free and alcoholic in describing my teenage self.
My parents had contracted a bad case of Bronxvilleâs ivyleague fever.
âIâll give Lattie Coor a call,â my father said when I got home from my interview in Burlington. I told him I didnât really do so well and he came up with the idea of calling the president of UVM, Lattie Coor, someone he knew from St. Louis, to âcall in a favor.â My father always knows someone, someone who can get the job done, get you into that college; he knows editors of magazines, people who run theaters, and famous philanthropists, but not one deal has ever been closed on account of these connections, ever. These calls he makes are about as effective and insidery as chain letters. âWe drove up together with a WU student to Wisconsin, La Crosse, to campaign for McCarthyâLattie was provost at the time and trying to stay close to the kids. Iâll give him a call after dinner.â
I didnât mention to my dad that I had been totally hungover after doing blow and beer bongs all night at a frat party, that Iâd been exhausted after employing my Jackie Chan maneuvers (my tendency to get all ass-kicky when drinking) to fight off trust-fund rapists, and could barely answer the questions Iâd been asked at the interview. That stuff seemed like, well, a given.
I thought my problem was academic, Lazie-onnaireâs disease, Layme Disease, Dumbentia. Because no one ever said anything about my drinking. We drank on weekends but also did a fair amount of drinking during actual school hours at Bronxville High School. We had daytime kegs at nearby Scout Field. When someone put a sock up on a post in the school courtyard in the morning that meant some people were going to the beer distributor in Tuckahoe to get a keg and there would be a party at âthe fieldâ around noon. âSockâs upâ somebody would say, looking out the window of Mrs. Ribnerâs English class that overlooked the courtyard where the sock hung on a post. Apparently a beer smell coming off me in the middle of the day didnât seem unusual to teachers or my parents. Grades became everything but they had yet to weigh in on daytime drinking. When Katharine came home one night with twigs in her hair and said she had decided to take a little nap while walking home from a party and toppled into a pricker bush by the side of the road, it became one of the funny stories we told. The only rule we had around drinking was that Dad did not want us drinking before going out at night. Julia and I were having some beers before a party once and he came in and let us know that he didnât want us drinking before parties. No pre-drinking drinking.
Smoking wasnât particularly frowned upon, either. You couldnât smoke in front of Dad, from his own asthma he seemed to have some idea that children shouldnât smoke, but Mom didnât object too much as long as you didnât smoke her cigarettes. She kept her cartons of cigarettes in a drawer in the kitchen and she was beginning to notice that packs were being opened rather savagely as if by a novice. Julia and I denied smoking her brand and were vindicated when the novices turned out to be rats living in our basement who would come up into the kitchen drawers at night and eat her cigarettes. Her children smoking her stash was bad enough, but rats, they could damn well get their own cigarettes. She promptly called an exterminator.
My dad made me take Princeton Review, the SAT preparation course, on Saturday mornings. It was expensive,
My parents had contracted a bad case of Bronxvilleâs ivyleague fever.
âIâll give Lattie Coor a call,â my father said when I got home from my interview in Burlington. I told him I didnât really do so well and he came up with the idea of calling the president of UVM, Lattie Coor, someone he knew from St. Louis, to âcall in a favor.â My father always knows someone, someone who can get the job done, get you into that college; he knows editors of magazines, people who run theaters, and famous philanthropists, but not one deal has ever been closed on account of these connections, ever. These calls he makes are about as effective and insidery as chain letters. âWe drove up together with a WU student to Wisconsin, La Crosse, to campaign for McCarthyâLattie was provost at the time and trying to stay close to the kids. Iâll give him a call after dinner.â
I didnât mention to my dad that I had been totally hungover after doing blow and beer bongs all night at a frat party, that Iâd been exhausted after employing my Jackie Chan maneuvers (my tendency to get all ass-kicky when drinking) to fight off trust-fund rapists, and could barely answer the questions Iâd been asked at the interview. That stuff seemed like, well, a given.
I thought my problem was academic, Lazie-onnaireâs disease, Layme Disease, Dumbentia. Because no one ever said anything about my drinking. We drank on weekends but also did a fair amount of drinking during actual school hours at Bronxville High School. We had daytime kegs at nearby Scout Field. When someone put a sock up on a post in the school courtyard in the morning that meant some people were going to the beer distributor in Tuckahoe to get a keg and there would be a party at âthe fieldâ around noon. âSockâs upâ somebody would say, looking out the window of Mrs. Ribnerâs English class that overlooked the courtyard where the sock hung on a post. Apparently a beer smell coming off me in the middle of the day didnât seem unusual to teachers or my parents. Grades became everything but they had yet to weigh in on daytime drinking. When Katharine came home one night with twigs in her hair and said she had decided to take a little nap while walking home from a party and toppled into a pricker bush by the side of the road, it became one of the funny stories we told. The only rule we had around drinking was that Dad did not want us drinking before going out at night. Julia and I were having some beers before a party once and he came in and let us know that he didnât want us drinking before parties. No pre-drinking drinking.
Smoking wasnât particularly frowned upon, either. You couldnât smoke in front of Dad, from his own asthma he seemed to have some idea that children shouldnât smoke, but Mom didnât object too much as long as you didnât smoke her cigarettes. She kept her cartons of cigarettes in a drawer in the kitchen and she was beginning to notice that packs were being opened rather savagely as if by a novice. Julia and I denied smoking her brand and were vindicated when the novices turned out to be rats living in our basement who would come up into the kitchen drawers at night and eat her cigarettes. Her children smoking her stash was bad enough, but rats, they could damn well get their own cigarettes. She promptly called an exterminator.
My dad made me take Princeton Review, the SAT preparation course, on Saturday mornings. It was expensive,
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