Read Here's the Story LP: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice for Free Online

tutored at night, and they’d been to our house for a barbecue. My father had taken her to the Canoga Park Inn, a lodge near our house.
    Then my mother stormed from the bedroom, went into the kitchen, and grabbed a bottle of wine. Until then, I’d never known her to take a sip of alcohol. She planted the bottle on the counter, poured herself a glass, and gulped it down. She drank a second glass, ignoring my father as he stood next to her, accusing her of spying on him. My mother yelled at him for trying to turn the tables, then stormed off, trying to get away from him.
    She stormed from room to room before pushing through the front door. From the front lawn, she turned and screamed at my father in the doorway. She didn’t care if any of the neighbors heard, something she ordinarily worried about whenever they raised their voices. Then she sat on the curb, buried her head in her hands, and cried so hard her entire body shook.
    By the time I ventured out to help her, she’d stopped crying. She looked at me through dazed eyes as I helped her up and back inside. The house felt cold and lonely that night. My brother Mike, now enrolled at UCLA, was managing an apartment building in Westwood. Kevin had gone out with his friends. Denny and I tried to comfort each other. We watched TV together, and every so often he turned to me and, as if reading my mind, said, “Dad had an affair with Kathy Pointer.”
    It was unfathomable. I thought for sure my parents would divorce. But a few nights later, while my mother was in her bedroom, my father called my brothers and me into the living room, acknowledged his affair, and then said there were reasons he’d gone outside the marriage, reasons that were justified by circumstances that us kids weren’t aware of but were probably old enough to understand.
    He went on to explain that he and my mother didn’t have a normal husband–wife relationship. He made that admission hesitantly, as if gauging our reaction. It definitely crossed new boundaries in terms of the information about intimacy shared in our family. After a pause, he said they didn’t have any such relationship and that in order to satisfy what he described as basic needs, he had to go someplace else.
    “You don’t know this about your mother,” he said, “but…”
    That’s when I learned—when all of us learned—facts about my mother and her family that she had kept hidden her entire life. My father told us my mother’s mother—our grandmother—had contracted syphilis, passed it to her daughter, and subsequently died from it in a mental institution. He said that my mother had been treated so that none of us would get syphilis, but he added that she’d also suffered a breakdown and received electroshock treatment when the boys were little.
    My father presented and spun facts to his advantage. It was all about what he had tolerated for years. We didn’t hear any of my mother’s side of the story. None of her torment and shame. I can’t imagine the devastation my mother must have felt as she listened to this from her bedroom. I know that after hearing that story, I never felt the same about my father, my mother, or myself.

    I wish I could say that after my father’s talk I ran to my mother and threw my arms around her, rejuvenating her with my unconditional love. Sadly, that didn’t happen. At some point that night I did seek her out and attempt to make her feel better, but I was really more interested in looking at her for signs of syphilis.
    Suddenly she was a curiosity to me. The next time the two of us were in the backseat of Susie Olsen’s mother’s car, I realized that I was staring at her the same way, searching for a sign or a symptom. I wanted to know what the syphilis looked like. She never brought it up, never offered an explanation, never uttered a word about it. It would be many years before we ever broached the subject.
    In the meantime, my relationship with her underwent a sudden, very subtle,