South of us was mostly blue-collar Irish Catholic families. The houses were always a few degrees too cold and the beds lacked headboards. Occasionally a father would disappear with a twenty-year-old, never to be seen again, but there would be no divorce. A college friend who spent sophomore year spring break with my family was convinced that my father was doing a comedy bit when he began updating me on the local gossip. The last names, she said, were so exclusively, defiantly Irish. The Connellys. The Flannerys. The O’Learys. And on and on. I overheard a weary Irish Catholic mother from Oak Park field a question about my family once. “How many McNamara kids are there?” she was asked.
“Only six,” she said. She had eleven.
My family had a foot in both sides of Oak Park. My parents were natives, members of the tribe commonly referred to as West Side Irish. They met in high school. My father was gap-toothed and jolly. He liked to laugh. My mother was the teetotaling eldest daughter of two hard partiers. She loved Judy Garland and had a lifelong fascination with Hollywood. “People used to tell me I resemble Gene Tierney,” she told me shyly once. I didn’t know who that was. When I saw Laura years later, the mysterious central character who shared my mother’s cascade of golden-flecked brown hair and delicately cut cheekbones mesmerized me.
The story is that my parents got together when my father knocked on my mother’s door looking, allegedly, for a friend of his. I believe it. The indirect approach to emotional matters suited them. They both had enormous eyes, my father’s blue, my mother’s green, that expressed with great feeling what they frequently could not.
My father briefly considered the seminary while away at Notre Dame. They called him Brother Leo. My mother considered other suitors and doodled alternate possibilities of her future last name. But Brother Leo decided the seminarians didn’t drink enough. Their friend, Rev. Malachy Dooley, officiated their wedding the day after Christmas, 1955. My eldest sister, Margo, was born the following September. Tease my mother with a raised eyebrow about the math and her cheeks burned. Her nickname in high school was Goody Two-Shoes.
After Northwestern Law School, my father went to work for the firm Jenner and Block downtown. He stayed thirty-eight years. Most days began for him in a chair on our screened-in front porch, one hand holding the Chicago Tribune, the other a cup of tea, and ended with a very dry Beefeater martini on the rocks with a twist. When he decided to get sober, in 1990, he announced the news in his usual quirky way. Each child received a typewritten form letter. “To my favorite child,” it began, “I’ve decided to join the Pepsi Generation.” He later claimed that only two children believed the salutation. I was one of them.
My siblings arrived in quick succession, four girls and a boy; I was the youngest, born after a six-year gap. My sister closest to me in age, Mary Rita, was too much older than me to be a real playmate. Looking back now, it feels as though I was born into a party that had started to wind down. By the time I came around, my parents had matching La-Z-Boy armchairs. Our front door was partly glass, and standing there you could see the back of my mother’s beige armchair in the living room. When any of the kids’ friends rang the doorbell, she’d stick her hand up and make a circling motion. “Go around,” she’d shout, directing them to the unlocked back door.
The families on our block were close, but the kids were all the same ages as my older siblings. They ran in a pack and returned home at dusk. I have a keen memory of what it was like to be a teenager in the seventies because I spent a lot of time with them. My sister Kathleen, ten years older, was and is the most extroverted of our family, and she toted me around like a beloved toy. I remember teetering precariously on the back of her banana seat as she pedaled to the Jewel grocery store on Madison Street. Everyone seemed to know her. “Hey, Beanie!” they called, using her nickname.
In Beanie’s freshmen year of high school, she developed an all-consuming crush on Anton, a quiet blond-haired boy who ran track. She took me with her to one of his meets. We hid high up in the bleachers to peek at him. I remember the love-wrecked expression on her face as we watched him explode forth from the starting line. I didn’t realize it then, but I was losing her to the complexities of high school. Soon I was sitting alone on the top of the back stairs that connected our kitchen to the second floor, watching teenage boys in sideburns chug beers in our breakfast nook as the Steve Miller Band’s “The Joker” played too loud.
Everyone in my family speaks mock reverently about the day in 1974 when the Van sisters—Lisa, my age; Kris, a year older— moved in across the street.
“Thank God,” they tease. “What would we have done with you?”
MANY OF MY PARENTS’ CLOSEST FRIENDS WERE FROM GRAMMAR school and high school. That they’d maintained such close bonds in an increasingly unmoored and transient world was a point of pride for them, as it should be, but it also had the effect, I think, of insulating them. Take them out of their comfort zone, and they became a little ill at ease. I think an undercurrent of shyness ran through them both. They gravitated toward bigger personalities. They used humor, sometimes sharply, to deflect tension. My mother especially seemed always in a state of suppressing— emotions, expectations. She had small, freckled hands and a habit of tugging her fingers when things got unpleasant.
I don’t mean to give the wrong impression. They were bright, curious people who traveled the world once they could afford to. My father argued, and lost, a case in front of the Supreme Court in 1971 that’s still studied in constitutional law classes. They subscribed to the New Yorker. They always had an interest in popular culture and what was considered good, or cool. My mother allowed herself to be taken to see Boogie Nights. (“I’m going to watch The Sound of Music twenty times in a row to forget that,” she said.) They were Kennedy Democrats. “Politically progressive,” my mother liked to say, “but socially conservative.” My father took my older sisters when they were ten and eight downtown to see Martin Luther King speak. They voted for Mondale in ’84. But when I was nineteen, my mother once woke me at dawn in a panic, shaking a handful of unfamiliar (to her) pills. She couldn’t bring herself to say “pill.”
“You’re on the . . . ,” she said.
“Fiber,” I said, and turned back to sleep.
BUT THEN OUR RELATIONSHIP WAS ALWAYS FRAUGHT. MY SISTER Maureen remembers coming home when I was around two and finding my mother pacing the front porch. “I don’t know if I’m crazy,” she said, fighting tears, “or Michelle.” My mother was forty then. She had endured alcoholic parents and the death of an infant son. She was raising six kids with no help. I’m sure I was the crazy one. Her lifelong nickname for me, only half-jokingly, was the Little Witch.
We button-pushed our whole lives. She stonewalled. I glowered. She scribbled notes on envelopes and slid them under my bedroom door. “You’re vain, thoughtless, and rude,” a notorious one went, concluding, “but you’re my daughter and of course I love you very much.” We had a summer cabin on Lake Michigan, and I remember one afternoon as a kid playing in the waves as she read a book in a chair on the beach. I realized that the waves were just high enough so that I could remain underwater and then rise for a quick breath when the wave was at its highest, shielding me from view. I let my mother straighten up and scan the water. I let her put down her book. I let her stand. I let her run toward the water preparing to scream. Only then did I pop up nonchalantly.