Long Way Off

By Vanessa Grace Feld

"Long Way Off" is an intimate and at times startling view into the journey of being human. In this deeply personal story, the author reveals her struggles with alcoholism, addiction, eating disorders, and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Mental illness and addiction can oftentimes present a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. Vanessa's story reminds readers that there is a path to healing and survival. No matter how bleak it seems, there is hope.

Vanessa starts her journey in the ritzy New York suburb of Westchester only to wind up homeless. No amount of Ivy League education can save her. This is a story for people who want an insider's view of resurrection out of chaos.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098390259

Book preview

CHAPTER

ONE

See you later escalator, my grandfather called out over the years when he routinely carried me from my mother’s doorstep to his Caddy. He brought me into his house through a door in the garage, where the smell of motor oil mixed with laundry soap welcomed me to safety. The Scarsdale ritual always provided relief. Omey eased me into a bubble bath, deposited my clothes into her laundry machine, washed my long hair with what looked like honey, and decorated me in a short, lacey baby doll nightgown with matching underpants. The dress opened like an umbrella when I twirled. Opey, a tycoon in the textile industry, pinched the material of anything I ever modeled for him, nodded his head, Very nice, and returned his gaze to the evening news.

One visit, I fell face first in to a jagged metal candlestick. My first scar was a half-moon that still hangs faintly on my jaw line today. I learned then that losing one’s balance was the result of one colossal misstep or an unfortunate accident.

Balance, Opey said to me then, and also for the rest of my life. It’s is all about balance. But I’ve learned since then that a deviation from the intended course, really losing one’s stability, can happen in such tiny increments that you don’t sense the change in direction. Or get hurt and bawl like I did in Scarsdale. Rather, it happens over time. You dodge the truth once, then ignore the unspeakable, dismiss it again, and are shocked that things collapsed so suddenly.

My father bent on one knee in front of me as if proposing, and I thought, Great! because I finally had his full attention. Instead, I heard, Honey, your mom and I… I’m leaving today. We are getting divorced. That means you stay here and I go away, but you come visit me on weekends. A moving truck already idled on the curb. The deep revving and vibrating made things feel rushed. We fight too much. It’s not good for you.

All my mediating had been for naught. I had dutifully memorized, 222 Martling Avenue, 638-5828. Done everything I was told. I had begged my parents to get along, approached each separately to explain the other. They both had their points. Was there ever such a thing as completely right and completely wrong?

But I understood that I stayed here and my father went somewhere else. There was nothing left to do, so I accepted things as fact and walked back down the sloped sidewalk to the building’s door and into our tiny first floor apartment.

I often waited outside in the hall, told to go play and not come back until five o’clock. The super let me in when my mother wasn’t home, or forgot her keys or lost them, or left them at some guy’s house. That’s just how it is with three kids and no one to help, my mother snapped. The barrelshaped superintendent nodded, opened our door for us, and bustled back into her apartment with a clatter of keys and annoyance which soon became fascination. As my mother’s dates came and went, the super peeked out her door at us, knowing my dad was gone, as if something interesting might happen.

It was just another day that my mother was not home when I got off the school bus. I waited to tell her, like I did every day, that I hate Montessori School. I killed time, pulling the handles on the cigarette machine – ka-thunk – and squeezing between the washing machines for quarters. I loathed Montessori School. Even today when I drive past a sign for a Montessori school with the innocent little letters in primary colors pretending to be crayon, I still taste bile.

I waited in the lobby, my legs dangling from a bench. Even then I hated my thighs and held them slightly elevated rather than let them squash into the wooden slats and widen like quickly poured pancake batter. I saw my mother’s eyes when she looked at the spindly girls and how different her gaze was when she turned to me.

I thought briefly about the air raid at school today, crouching in the hall, then I returned to my real concern. I watched for my mother through a wall of glass out to the street. I blurt to the doorman, My mom is going to give us away. I don’t know why I told him. I just did.

Mm-hmm. He didn’t look up.

Brucie Flower told me. His mom told him. Suzie Flower, Brucie’s mom, always hung around our apartment since dad left, sitting on my rocking horse among an avalanche of toys, smoking cigarettes, talking with my mom. I overheard just enough information to keep me scared.

Just then a loud sound grew near, like a bird’s wings flapping violently inside a cage, a piercing screech. My mother’s car could be heard long before it appeared. She pulled into a parking spot, the car looking proud somehow, ambivalent yet unyielding, sassy in a way, a maroon Vega with its Jaguar hood ornament. My mother climbed out of the debris, swinging a bag with long fringes over her shoulder and they flew in the air like an endless ponytail. Swooshing through the glass doors with the ironic bronze handles, wearing a flowery headband, hoop earrings, bell bottoms, and frosty white lipstick like she has been eating sugar doughnuts, my mother took my hand, saying, Let’s go, Monkey Face, and thanked the doorman. He stood up straighter, his eyes bulged, which was invariably what happened with men when my mother was around.

Inside our apartment my mother went to check her make-up in the bathroom mirror and in that moment I realized I would have to fend for myself. Where I will go, with whom, and how? Cross-legged and cheeks hot, I sat on the floor and let the refrigerator illuminate my sweaty face. I hoped for some big ideas, realized I needed a stick and a bandanna. Droplets of perspiration landed on my knees as I fretted about how life would possibly go on.

My mother spotted me in the bathroom mirror and offered, without turning around, Honey, do you need some help?

I’m running away. I expected a shower of attention, some pleading with me to stay.

Instead, she came to me, stuck her face next to mine in the glowing refrigerator light, and in succession, she gave me an apple, a pickle, and a carrot and offered me one last glass of water. I blinked rapidly, like the fluttering of a butterfly. She really did want to give me away.

I am my mother’s daughter. I couldn’t be anyone else’s. Before Noam came along, she and I remained inseparable. She loved me silly. Now, I stand lost in the middle of a snow storm without my winter coat, without maternal adornments like mittens and a hat, no sunken foot steps to show me the way back.

My brother Noam was born with autism, which back in 1966 warranted banishment to life in a state hospital. My mother refused. Doctors called Noam retarded, and all I understood was that Noam didn’t talk, he didn’t understand, he got special treatment, and my mother loved him more than she loved me. To this accusation she said, Well, maybe I do. I believed her. And now I had proof.

My baby sister Thea came along shortly before my dad left. More than being a burden, Thea footnoted the end of my parents’ marriage. She’s soooooo beautiful, my father said. She looks like an Indian princess! Aside from comments about Thea’s unquestionable beauty, she was mostly ignored.

You have to take them, Bruce! It’s your turn! From the other end of the phone my father hardly had time to answer. They’ll be at the train station and I don’t have train fare. You can ride out to get them. Or not. More than once I had to explain to the conductor that we had no money, but that our dad would be at Grand Central to pay. Noam and Thea watched out the Pyrex window as suburban trees turn to tenements, impervious to the shame. Thea a baby and Noam off in his own world.

Opey cried when he learned my mother wanted to give us away, so he hired a woman from Guiana, Jane, to help raise us. Vee vill vork this out, he assured me, one vay before the other.

One after another, men showed up at our door. My mother would be gone for hours. Or days, we never really knew. Thea’s first words came out with a West Indian accent, although she couldn’t say much because she was always perched in a highchair, her cheeks bloated with spicy meat patties and roti she refused to swallow.

Thea, like Jane, used pronouns after nouns. So if Thea ever had her tiny mouth clear enough to talk, it would be something like, This meat patty, she don’t taste so good.

Again, my mother put on make-up in front of the bathroom mirror. Mom? Is there really no Santa? I already knew the answer but wanted to make sure.

No, honey.

No? Like there’s no Santa? I didn’t want it to be true. I already felt uneasy because I had come to associate her time in the mirror with feelings of abandonment and dread.

No honey, no Santa. Enraged and indignant, I kicked the corner of a wall, screamed because it hit between my toes, threw Bartholemew, our paper mâché cat who had nothing to do with any of this, and dropped to the floor crying. This formed my first experience of complete emotional breakdown, everything coming together at once.

Again, a moving truck sat ready to pull out of the driveway of 222 Martling Avenue. My mother decided to move us from our apartment into a house with Phil, the guy she eventually chose. Already I could sense the undertow, the disorientation that came with increasing distance from home. But for now, I just needed to be rational and adjust to my new father. I must be lucky, I persuaded myself. I don’t just have one father. Now I have two.

Phil stood in the back of the truck with the door still up. I stood in the truck with him, elevated, on a stage for my farewell, and waved goodbye to my first best friend and a bunch of other kids from the building, some bullies who tortured me at the bus stop, others who were similarly humiliated. You know, Ness, you will never see them again, Phil offered. I froze. He might as well have announced that my life was over.

A surge of questions welled up in my throat. What? Why not? So now what? I had spent so much time with Leslie Garling at her apartment, huddled together on the floor in front of a black and white TV watching Creature Feature. On the screen, black birds pecked and strut menacingly. Leslie made me lie closest to the set when certain episodes aired, in particular The Birds or The Blob because the show scared her. I liked Leslie, so I dealt with it.

During the day we swam together in the building’s pool, made Melissa Kaminski eat poison berries, and lifted up our shirts in the bike room for the boys from Sleepy Hollow.

Leslie’s dad lived quietly and kindly, withdrawn to a painful place behind his eyes. I know now that he suffered from a wife, flailing, drowning, right there in front of him, grotesquely, in a sea of alcohol. He went through the motions of raising Leslie and did his best to keep moving, not stand aghast.

Mr. Garling took us on walks with their mangy dog Friskie, who perpetually looked and smelled like he just fought with a mud puddle. Leslie’s dad took us to Jones Beach where we got tumbled by the waves for hours until we could not ingest any more salt water and the crotches of our bathing suits weighted us down with sand.

I felt confused when Leslie’s mother cried so often, slid in the oil slick of her words, and when Leslie, bright red and spitting, said vicious things to her mom like, I hate you, and, I wish you were dead. I never got why Mr. Garling looked more weathered than Friskie.

Alone, Leslie and I played out needs and desires we couldn’t verbalize or understand. My doll feels sicker than your doll, she announced. She needs me to stay calm and find the aspirin, Leslie explained, standing on a chair and picking through the bottles in her parents’ medicine cabinet. Mine needs oxygen, I said, dramatically blowing air into the plastic face of my dying doll.

Well, mine needs all this medicine. Leslie gestured with her chin towards a long row of plastic amber bottles, holding her ailing doll.

A small box caught my eye. I recognized the white, red, and blue. Well, mine needs those Band-Aids, I countered. She bleeds a lot.

I knew my doll hurt more than Leslie’s. After all, Leslie had a pink canopy bed that I would have died for. Her dad stayed around and he loved her like crazy.

I watched Leslie shrink in the distance as our moving truck pulled away.I held my breath, terrified, not knowing what would happen to all our jokes, imitating Lily Tomlin: One ringy dingy and That’s the truth with a tongue fart at the end, shouting, Warning, warning! from Lost in Space.

Omey knew to give me a diary with a tiny lock and key to write down my crazy feelings. I wrote the same thing every time I woke up at her house. Today I woke up. I ate farina, like a Cheech and Chong report about summer vacation. Omey liked to make farina, obviously, and I recorded it for thirty-two pages straight. Apparently, I did not understand the idea of expressing feelings, a nascent blind spot that followed me for many years.

I liked to lose myself in climbing the long, curved stairs to the bedroom level of Omey’s house, taking my time to make designs in the thick gray carpet with my big toe by making the fibers go against the grain. Our worn-out carpet at home, thin as a bed sheet, had splinters and nails poking through.

I resisted the smooth and shiny banister upstairs, so tempting for me when wearing the perfect sliding material of my silky new night gown. I slid down the less visible railing to the basement instead, where Uncle Tim’s old toys came to life, the tiny plastic pea green soldiers and sleek metal cars.

Upstairs though, I found my mother’s stuff: her old dollhouse, her bed covered in stuffed animals waiting patiently and expectantly for her to someday walk back through the door. A carved wooden jewelry box enshrined a rhinestone poodle pin that I would have given my life for. And a few forgotten Stars of David.

A closet in the room held outfits for little girls, some for my mother as she grew up and some bought for me. I was not allowed to take any dresses home where they would be, I had to agree with Omey, immediately ruined.

You vill never be able to vear ladies shoes if you keep that up, Omey warned about going barefoot. She had my clothes washed and some preparatory socks, more than a little suggestive to my mother, mended by the time I had to leave. A Stitch in Time Saves Nine was, to me, an abstract phrase woven on the front of Omey’s sewing box. I reached my twenties before I realized what it means to save nine.

Inside the matching French provincial desk of the bedroom set, I found love letters from my dad that I read and reread. Sometimes I stared at the flowers on the dresser and headboard painted with mock passivity or at the repetitive pattern of the wallpaper, a few red robins on twigs, more robins, more twigs, over and over. But when I got into reading the letters, everything else disappeared.

I could imagine my mother opening the letter. It began with her pet name, Dear Frog. She called him Toad. Some photos showed my mother modeling. I heard constantly from Opey about her exquisite beauty and enviable figure, but even as a six-year-old I could see she looked even better as she aged, without the enormous hair and dramatic make-up, how she just continued to get even prettier.

I stared at the photograph,