The Lidster

When I was a little kid, I thought it was pretty neat that my stepmom and my stepdad had previously been married.

To each other.

I can remember how people, adult people, would look at me funny, with a slight frown or a raised eyebrow, when I would offer up that bit of information, as if they weren’t quite sure whether to believe me or pity me or both. I liked the fact that my sister and I and my stepsiblings were all double-related; I remember thinking, even if Dad and Helen get divorced, or Mom and Bob get divorced, we’ll still be related.

That comforted me, somehow.

When I got a little older, I began to contemplate how this whole arrangement must have happened. All I could remember were scraps of memories of my dad living at our house, and then how, one night after an evening at the Moose, we all ended up over at Bob and Helen’s, and Debra and I got stuck playing hide ’n’ seek or Chinese checkers or something with this kid named Bobby; it had never occurred to me what must have been going on to result in two families being broken up. Once it did, though, whenever anyone would realize that my stepparents had once been together, I’d sort of shrug it off, laugh and say — just as I think I’d heard Bobby say — “Yeah, they pulled the old switcheroonie!”

Obviously, my parents weren’t exactly friends after their divorce, but they tried to get along reasonably well, for the sake of their kids. My dad and my stepdad pretty much hated each other, so they avoided one another as much as possible. Whenever they’d been drinking and ran into each other, though, they’d invariably get to mouthing, and before you knew it, one of them would be threatening to kill or beat the shit out of the other.

The things we do for love ...

One night, middle of the night, it’s summertime and the phone rings. Our phone is right outside the door to my sister and I’s room, and even though we’ve got the door shut, it’s one of those accordion-style doors that you can hear right through. (Two drawbacks to that kind of door: You can’t ever really slam it when you’re pissed, and your mom can hear every smart-ass word you mutter when you’re stomping around your room, pissed.)

Helen’s on the phone. She and Dad went out, and when they got home, they had a big fight; he beat her up, she tells my stepdad, and now she and the kids are at the Lidster Hotel.

Mom gets us out of bed and makes us get dressed, and the four of us go down there, down to the Lidster. Up in the hotel room, up on the second floor, it’s hot, but my stepbrother and stepsisters are huddled together. Helen stands in the middle of the room. She’s crying and yelling — she sounds like she might be a little drunk, still, and as she rants, I notice she’s wearing a sleeveless white button-down blouse with little maroon roses on the front.

Bob tries to quiet her down and tells her he’s going to take care of it, that he’s gonna kick my dad’s ass when he finds him. And then, a few minutes later, maybe an hour, who knows, everyone’s calm, everything’s fine, Helen and her kids are going to spend the rest of the night in the Lidster, the four of us are going back home ... just as Helen and her kids did, later that day.

I don’t think I ever heard whether Bob kicked Dad’s ass over that. They probably had at least one or two more fistfights before Bob eventually crashed his truck into a tree three blocks from home one night and decided to give up drinking, permanently, but if they did, I don’t remember them.

I also don’t remember when it was — a day later? a decade? — that I realized those weren’t roses on the front of Helen’s blouse.