Tommy Munchmeyer

My brother and I were used to being left with babysitters. But after we moved into the house on the hill, life changed and was somehow less safe. 

The first time my mother and father went out to dinner, one of the blonde teenage sisters from our old neighborhood, Susie or Yolanda, came to watch us. Eager to draw with her, I ran through the downstairs hallway with our gallon canning jar full of broken crayons. I tripped, and the jar slipped from my grasp then shattered on the ground in front of me. My last thought before I fell to the ground and a triangle of glass speared my hand was that my mother had told me never to run with that jar.

The skin of my palm gaped and bled from two places. Susie-or-Yolanda pulled the big pieces of glass out of the wound and rinsed it under cold water before wrapping it in a dishtowel. She tried to call my parents, but wherever she thought they’d gone, they weren’t where she expected them to be.

None of these events bothered me in the least—I thought we were having an adventure. We sat next to the phone in the kitchen of the house on the hill and waited. I was sure my parents would be surprised when they found out.

After blood seeped through the first towel, we cheerfully replaced it with another. But the sight of so much of what belonged inside me leaking out began to gnaw at my equilibrium.

By the time my mother and father returned, the third towel was showing crimson, and I was getting twitchy. The babysitter went home, and I went to Camden Clark Hospital, where my mother worked as a social worker during the week. I had to wait in a quiet bay to be seen, which gave me more time to get spun up.

The emergency room doctor finally arrived. But each time he tried to examine my hand, I screamed.

“I haven’t done anything yet,” he said, turning his head to make eye contact with me. “I’m still looking at it.”

I felt sure that eventually, he would try to do something. I continued to yell.

“If she doesn’t stop,” he said to my father, “we’ll have to sedate her.”

Sedate wasn’t a word I knew; yet in that moment, the doctor and I had achieved a mystical communion. I understood his threat perfectly. I closed my mouth and stared into the distance.

He numbed the wound, and I soon felt a tugging on my skin, as if a small monster were trying to escape. By the time I gathered the nerve to look, he had threaded six stitches through the tissue of my left palm, binding the mouth of the incision closed.

***

Weeks later, wearing winter boots, I tried to skate on the ice that greased the sloping sidewalk between our house and our neighbor’s. As the pinkie on my right hand wedged deep between logs stacked in the woodpile next to the house, the rest of my body continued hurtling forward.

It was my first broken bone, but only a small break and only a finger, which could be taped to its neighbor until it healed. I understood such minor disfigurement hardly counted.

I continued to self-destruct. Our back porch sat level with the front door, but the angle of the hill on which the house was built meant the main floor stood nine or ten feet off the ground at the rear of the house. Panels of wooden garden lattice hung between the tall brick piers bracing the porch at the back. They were flimsy and not meant to bear weight, but I was still small, and that day I was Spiderman. A fall from near the top landed me on crutches for two weeks.

More and more often, my brother and I went unsupervised, inside the house and out. I got a miniature red and white bicycle with training wheels and rode it up and down our one-block street paved with red brick introducing myself to neighbors. Donna Jack, a divorcee who cut hair, lived across the street, with a beauty salon at the back of her house. A bachelor named Larry, whose home sat squarely facing the dead end of our street, kept two friendly huskies in pens.

Bruce, a haggard man who lived in a huge pink and brown house near the dogs, walked back and forth from downtown most days. Chatty without being scary, he always said hello or made small talk, though I had trouble understanding him. For months, I thought he had a speech impediment, but one day when he stood closer to me, I smelled his breath and realized he was drunk.

Two brothers known as Pete and Repeat lived for a while with Bruce in what seemed to be a boarding house. They wore matching outfits and walked everywhere together, miles each day. They were famous hobos who had wandered all over the country. That we were living among celebrities was a source of pride to me.

After the training wheels came off my bike, I went twice as fast. The slight downhill slope of our block let me fly like lightning, though the unevenness of the bricks made the metal frame rattle. With the wind in my face and momentum to keep me upright, I felt for the first time that I might be capable of greatness.

The day I abandoned those training wheels, my father was surely the person who unscrewed the fat bolts and bars that attached them to the bike. But trying now to picture him in my early childhood, he’s mostly vanished.

In hazier recollections from my first years, I only sense him coming or going, though my mother told me dozens of times how much he loved to play with my brother and me when we were babies. From our time together in the house on the hill, I have only two clear memories of him.

Once, we went with my brother and uncle to the park on top of Quincy Hill. Wandering away from the grownups, I began climbing a tree next to the street. Liking the rough feel of the peeling bark under my hands and the rhythm of ascending, I kept looking for a way to go higher. Soon I stood above the telephone wires that ran through the branches, king of my own country.

At some point, my father noticed and came to stand at the base of the trunk, calling for me to come down. I was probably only forty or fifty feet off the ground, but when I looked out, everything seemed so small. He was down there, visible but already far away.

The only other time I recall his presence, we were in the living room at the house on the hill, sitting on the couch and chairs—my parents, my brother, and me. I have a sense of late afternoon light coming in through the windows on the side of the house. My parents explained that they had stopped loving each other. They wouldn’t be married anymore.

Here was a reality I would have said was impossible less than five minutes before, but it didn’t alarm me. Their feelings for us hadn’t changed, they said. People sometimes stopped loving each other, but they didn’t change their minds about their children. My mother and father planned to live apart, and we would spend time with each of them.

Their calmness reassured me. I pictured another house as big as the house on the hill, with another large room just for me. I imagined owning twice as many things.

Neither of them ever spoke a cruel word to me about the other. When I was an adult, my mother told me that right after we’d moved into the house on the hill, my father claimed he’d signed up for an evening class at the local community college, but his story turned out not to be true. Not long after she discovered the truth, he walked into the dining room and said he didn’t know if he wanted to be married anymore.

“The next day,” my mother told me, “I went to Tommy Munchmeyer’s office, and I asked him to draw up papers.”

My father would later say they separated because my mother had an affair. After eight years of marriage, he asked her to return the engagement ring he’d given her and had its diamond reset into something he could keep and wear himself. I now have that ring, a delicately cut round stone wedged into a square setting on a thick band—as much the awkward result of their love and its dissolution as I am.

My brother recalls another snapshot from those days. He remembers my mother driving off in her car without warning, and my father sitting next to him on a step at the streetcorner in front of the house on the hill.

My brother asked if my mother would come back.

“I don’t know,” my father answered.

In the end, they agreed she would get full custody. My father kept the old house on Sixteenth Street, which was being rented. He wound up moving in with a friend. The rest of us stayed on Madison Avenue, which would be referred to as “the former marital domicile” in court filings.

No show was made of his departure, no packed boxes were paraded in front of us, the children. My brother and I would see him some weekends, we were told. Then he vanished from weekday life.

Once he was gone, it was clear that despite her faith in rules, my mother felt unsteady. She was working full-time but now all the bills were hers to pay. It had been hard enough for my parents to cover the cost of Montessori when they were together, she said. At the end of the school year, she would pull us out.

A single mother with two children to feed, at a time when women were unable to get a credit card or a bank loan on their own, she was suddenly the monarch of a tiny nation whose population had alarmingly dropped by one fourth overnight. And she had no organizing principle for a family without a husband.

***

Looking back, both the stories my parents told about the end of their love for each other might be true. It was clear that, at 20 and 19, neither of them had been adult enough to marry or have children in the first place. Years later, my mother would say, “In those days, if you wanted to sleep with someone, you were supposed to get married.”

Now that I’m twice the age they were when they divorced, in my mind they seem impossibly young announcing their split: so thin and fresh-faced, with no idea what would come next. It remains, somehow, a reassuring memory. I feel as tender and protective of them as I do my childhood self.

Though we were Catholic, my mother didn’t even give the Church a chance to reject her on the road to divorce. Within weeks of their separation, we started going to Christ Lutheran. We never entered a Catholic church as parishioners again.

Not long after my father moved out, my mother told me she felt a divorce would be her greatest failure—the worst sin she’d committed. She worried aloud on a regular basis afterward that the collapse of her marriage had inflicted invisible damage on my brother and me.

But she was the one who seemed diminished. One afternoon, standing in the kitchen silhouetted against a window with a view toward downtown, she froze. I thought at first she was watching something in the backyard but then realized she was gazing down. She had nothing in her hands and was looking at nothing.

She was always in motion; it was strange to see her still. The moment went on too long.

I had a terrible sense of her still being a child—that she was no more grown up than I was. I observed her from that perspective. A minute later, some shift broke the spell, and her inertia dissolved. She turned to face me, and I could imagine her again as my mother.

In the end, she focused on all the wrong things. Despite her constant worry, my parents’ bloodless separation, begun a few months after I turned five, inflicted no immediate harm on my brother or me.

Up to that point, in some other world, it might have all turned out fine. But in our world, when my father went away, a void rose in the house that begged to be filled. 

[You can read another story in this series about my West Virginia childhood here, or find out more about me and this newsletter in my About page.]