Daring by Gail Sheehy Read Free Book Online Page A

smile on his lips.
    â€œI’m starting a new life.”
    It didn’t take long for him to spill the story, as if he thought that I’d be as excited as he was that he wouldn’t have to commute anymore; he was leaving New York, leaving my mother, marrying a young woman he was sure I’d be crazy about—in fact, she was downstairs, just dying to meet me.
    I wished she was already dead.
    In that moment, our roles flipped. My father was the adolescent, bolting out of the family, deserting the nest, already in half flight, no catching him now. I turned into the scolding mother.
    â€œWhat are you thinking? Mom has been your handmaiden for how long? You’re going to dump her now?”
    â€œYour mother has her own friends now. She’s in AA.”
    His tone was cruelly condescending. This was the first I knew that my mother had acknowledged her alcoholism. All those years her “sinus attacks” had been the cover story for the disease of despair she had battled alone. I felt the crush of guilt.
    My father got up and went to the minibar. “Do you have any ginger ale?”
    â€œWhat about Trish?” I said. “Remember? You have another daughter; she’s only just graduated from high school.” He was flipping channels on the TV looking for business news.
    â€œYour sister has lots of friends; she’ll be fine.”
    My sister and I had grown up in different families. The year I escaped to college, our parents moved to a sterile exurb in southern Connecticut where men like my father commuted to Manhattan in the predawn of the Mad Men era and competed to be top dog in their ad agencies. Dad was a Don Draper precursor, with zipper-tight lips, precisely barbered dark hair, square-framed aviator sunglasses, a sliver of white pocket handkerchief peeking from the breast pocket of his gray flannel suit. The mother who had been left home with my much younger sister had been a ghost mother. Trapped in her forties in the exurbs, with neither the skills nor experience to start a career, Mother had seen herself like most first wives of her era, as little more than a convenience, like a frozen dinner or a new garbage disposal. Years later, my sister told me that during her high school years, Mom had given up trying. She mostly sat around the kitchen drinking with the plumber from next door. Trish had to tell her when she needed a training bra.
    My father came home in the bar car of the Metro North Railroad, flirting with secretaries who scavenged for the low-hanging fruit of frustrated marriages. A popular local politician, he had an excuse to be out almost every weeknight. His weekends were lived on the golf course. I assumed that his new girlfriend was one of those belles of the bar car and had probably taken up the role of “golf friend” when it was vacated by Bernice.
    That day in the hotel room, I confronted my father: “Who’s looking after Trish? Is anyone taking her around to look at colleges?”
    He said he thought Mom was working on getting her into the University of Hartford. Trish was an afterthought. What my father really wanted to talk about was his own new dream, about his bride-to-be, how they had everything in common. (Really? His girlfriend was barely twenty-one.) About the branch office he was opening in San Francisco and the prize for which he had waited twenty-five years as the slavishly loyal number two—leadership of the company when the founder retired.
    â€œDad,” I said, “you’re fifty-two years old. How do you get to be the kid?”
    He said he had never felt younger. “Sonny Boy” did look preternaturally coltish. I was the one who felt suddenly old. I asked my father to promise that he would fulfill his responsibility to pay for my sister’s college expenses until she graduated. He gave me the doublespeak learned in the ad game. I had a sickening feeling that his allegiance had already been withdrawn from