Diamond in the Rough Read online

  My parents were barely out of high school when they met and married, and they had my brother inside a year, then me. My mom was twenty-three when she had me; my dad was twenty-five. She had us, she raised us, she made our home, and she stood by Dad as he uprooted the family twice in order to get his Ph.D. My mother cared, she cared terribly, perhaps she cared too much. She was caught between having the gift of compassion and the curse of concern for appearances. And Mother believed she could or should control it all, fix it, make it right, make it perfect.

  As a kid I so loved my mother. I wanted my mother to think I was the greatest girl on earth. She was perfect. She was gracious and kind and kept herself up. She was soothing and calm. Mother even drank her coffee with her little pinkie out. I thought she must know everything. I thought she was magic. With Mother everything would be all right. She had supernatural powers.

  Mother had grace. She’s small-boned and delicate. She never moved with urgency or lost her temper except to say “Fudge!” now and then if she accidentally burned or cut herself or chipped a nail. Her hands were of great pride to her, and to this day she continually puts on hand lotion and files her nails, which are always polished to perfection. Her smile was warm and bright white and dazzling, and as a girl she was downright stunning in a Katharine Hepburn sort of way, with shiny curled hair and cheekbones for days. When she stood, she did so like a ballet dancer, posture perfect. Mother dressed crisply in the clothes she made for herself, whether she was going out for cocktails or gardening. To this day she may indulge in a sip of wine or beer. I remember when you could buy Miller in mini seven-ounce bottles—my mother would drink half of one, cap it, and place it back in the fridge.

  I loved my mother, and I knew I would never be as wonderful as she was. I was awkward and careless, always fretting and worried over something. I had snarly hair and a space between my teeth. I played in the mud and dug up the flower garden to make hollyhock dolls. My white anklet socks for church fell down and got caught in the heels of my patent-leather shoes. I was scared of thunder. I was scared of dying. I was scared of the dark. And I was willful.

  My mother had a different daughter in mind, I think, certainly a child more malleable and refined. Someone more like my older brother, Geoff, a model kid, smart as a whip and eager to please. He seemed to possess a certain sophistication right from the get-go. Geoff studied classical violin in favor of the guitar. While I grudgingly took piano lessons, it was the Beatles, not Bach, who snared me.

  Now, my dad, he’s a performer. Dad has always held court with jokes and one-liners and philosophical tidbits. He’s got advanced Alzheimer’s now and can’t remember my name, but at lunch in the Memory Unit the other day I sat with him as the Hispanic attendant cleared his plate. “Are you feenish?” she asked, and my dad, not missing a beat, replied, “No, I’m German.” Which he’s not, but that’s not the point. Dad has a quick wit. My mother especially likes a comment I made in frustration once to Dad as he was milking me for attention. “React! React!” I shouted. And it stuck.

  Although he got his doctorate in psychology, he chose not to practice but to teach—another form of performance. My father had a guitar and a banjo and longed to be a member of the Kingston Trio the way I would long to be a Beatle. He and a couple of his friends would convene in the backyard from time to time, donning matching short-sleeved striped, button-down shirts and play their favorites by the trio. Dad taught me a few basic chords on the guitar, and I fell in love with it. Yes, I got blisters and my fingers bled, but no matter. Although I had been taking piano lessons since I was six, I soon lost interest. The guitar seemed made for me, and the ring of each painfully learned chord was a thrill. I was ten, it was 1966. It was Dad who gave me this.

  And it was Dad who had a hair-trigger temper. To this day he can furrow his brow in a way that still makes me shudder, although now it is nothing but mock anger, another joke. He even growls at the ladies in the Memory Unit to make them laugh. But I knew him when it wasn’t funny. I don’t know where it came from.

  Dad as General MacArthur, 1966

  Was my grandfather an angry person? Dad got it from somewhere. “It” was chasing me around the house in order to pin me down and smell my breath to determine if I had in fact stolen my brother’s peppermint candy. “It” was wrenching me from the chair at the kitchen table when I sassed, my feet catching underneath and dragging the chair across the linoleum, or pushing me against walls if I left the basement door open. It was Dad who sang me to sleep on the couch in the living room in front of the fire. And Dad who grew so frustrated with me for waking my mother up in the night that he kept me awake all night once, so I could “see what it felt like.” I was six years old.

  I can’t help but think that my dad saw himself in me to a certain extent, which seemed both bad and good. Dad and I competed for attention; we were both headstrong smart-asses, passionate and volatile. Now, being a parent myself, I know that when you see your kids mirror back your personality and behavior, it’s interesting but not always positive. If anyone in the Colvin family is prone to having outbursts like my father, it’s me. I don’t exactly see stars, but I can become pretty angry. Mostly in my relationships with men, which I’ll get into later.

  When I think of my dad, I see his shit-eating grin. I see his compact, taut body bent over a banjo or a sailboat or a power saw. I see the delight on his face at my imitation of LBJ. I see the black thunderhead of his temper blow in after we once again break the sprinkler by running through it in the hot midwestern summer.

  Dad and me, 1986

  Dad loved a project in the garage, whether it was restoring a sports car or designing a canoe or building anything from the family-room couch to model airplanes to the bomb shelter on Canby Street. His uniform was jeans, a T-shirt, and a yellow canvas Windbreaker that was covered in all manner of wood stains and glue globs and dirt and oil. My mother tried to throw it away about fifteen years ago, but I rescued it. Somehow that Windbreaker is my father to me. When I think of my dad, he is a full garment, the color of the sun, marred by rips and stains and sweat. He seems always in pursuit of something and never quite getting it. He was by turns charming and fun-loving and ferocious, at once lovable and fearsome, and I never knew which trait to put my faith in.

  When I was six, my sister, Kay, dethroned me. I have a photograph of me in my new homemade polyester Chinese pajamas curled around her little bouncing baby chair. She’s gazing up in wide-eyed wonderment, and I look totally forlorn. My sister has gorgeous wavy black hair, and my mother would put it up in a ponytail, twist Kay’s damp hair around her finger and slink the finger out, magically leaving a perfect ringlet. My hair was mousy brown and straight and always so full of tangles that my mother finally lost it one day, took me to the beauty shop, and had it all cut off with the shortest bangs imaginable. If memory serves, I resembled Richard Harris in Camelot, minus the goatee. The sibling rivalry was rather Laura Ingalls Wilder–esque, which is fitting given our Dakota birthplace, and hair really is so all-important. Kay got the goods there. She was also blessed with a willowy build, and she tanned easily, and for all of this I found many ways to torture her, like showing her a little scab that came off my knee and telling her it was a burned potato chip so she would eat it.

  New sister, new pajamas, 1961

  I am six years older, but I wasn’t much of a big sister to Kay. I didn’t know her very well until much later in our lives. It’s as though Geoff and I came as a matched pair and Kay and Clay came as another. My little brother, Clay, might be the most well adjusted out of all of us, save for the fact that he designs fighter jets for Lockheed Martin. But he also raises bonsai trees and is one of the dying breed of true gentlemen. Anyway, Kay and Clay had their world, Geoff and I had ours, and the two did not intersect. I’d moved out of the house by the time my sister was eleven and my little brother was eight. I was not really a witness to their growing up, nor did I even care to be.

  Christmas card, 1972, in the canoe and po
ol Dad built

  I moved to New York in 1980 when I was twenty-four and Kay was eighteen. My family drove up to give me some furniture, and Kay came along. She had finally grown into someone I could relate to. Her first morning there, we walked to the Greek coffee shop on the corner to get coffee. The cashier, upon seeing us, smiled and said, “There is no doubt what you are to each other.” Apparently we had become a matched pair, and in the ensuing years we’ve sometimes been hard to tell apart.

  She began to write me letters from Austin, where she was attending college, and I would call or write back. I had a new friend. This meant the world to me, because I felt there was the possibility that someone in my family might regard me as more than troubled and neurotic. Kay liked me. She needed my friendship, too. We each needed a sister.

  Our pet names for each other are “Fine” and “Violet.” The first was born from our salutations to each other when we wrote letters: “Dear fine yon sister” or “Dearest fine one.” This evolved simply into “Fine.” (Hello, Fine, how are you?) We developed our own language based on movie quotes, and this brought us to “Violet.” It’s a Wonderful Life is required viewing for us at Christmastime, and much of our dialogue is taken from it (“My mouth’s bleedin’, Burt! My mouth’s bleedin’!”)—most notably from an early scene at the drugstore where the young George Bailey, a soda jerk, greets the prettiest girl in school as she comes in to flirt with him: “H’lo, Violet.” Soon every phone call began this way. “H’lo, Violet.” Now we are Violet. And Vi. And Yer Vi. We’ve both lived in Austin now for fifteen years, and our daughters, the cousins, have grown up together. And although I may be the songwriter, it’s my sister, Kay, who developed our language and our nicknames, and she might say at this point, “Violet, there’ll be nary a dry eye!”

  I got my mother’s cheekbones and mouth, my dad’s nose and eyes. My build resembles my father’s, solid and sinewy. My singing is a neat combination of the two of them—I inherited the dexterity of my mother’s trained, operatic-type voice and the earthy, just-us-folks warmth of my father’s delivery. I walk like a cowboy. I’m bound by deep love to my family and would do anything they asked of me. As my siblings and I got older, the gaps seemed to close, but growing up I sometimes felt like we were satellites, orbiting the planet of our parents, sending and receiving necessary information at regular intervals but ultimately alone out in space. To an extent, though, this has always been my nature—feeling apart from. Things would get worse for me before they got better.

  2

  A Vengeance

  Me at ten, with a space between my teeth and a bad hair day, 1966

  You don’t have to drag me down,

  I descend.

  The trouble mostly started when I was twelve, after the family moved from Vermillion to London, Ontario, briefly, and then on to Carbondale, Illinois. I was a simple geek in South Dakota, a cool cat in Canada, and a total freak show in Illinois—that was the general progression.

  From as far back as I can remember, I have been afflicted with phobias of a hypochondriac’s nature. From the flu to flesh-eating viruses to good old predictable brain cancer, I’ve spent more than my fair share of time worrying about what I might die of. I drove my poor mother crazy by asking her constantly, “Will I be all right?” This has been diagnosed as “panic disorder,” but for me it’s just been a general way of life. I was neurotic, anxious, headstrong, emotional, overly sensitive, and high-maintenance. (Haven’t changed much …) I took a lot of energy. I was afraid of dying. I was afraid of getting sick. I was simply afraid. I don’t know if it was the mood disorder already in play or if I was just that kind of kid. Maybe it was a combination of both.

  In 1967, when I was eleven, my father sold the small newspaper business he had inherited from his father and decided to go back to college to get a doctorate in psychology, so wherever his schooling took him, we followed. I’d lived in Vermillion my whole life, and I was terrified at the prospect of leaving. But leave we did. First stop: Canada!

  We moved into a split-level ranch house in the suburbs of London, Ontario, on Hunt Village Crescent, just down the street from a popular girl named Tara who befriended me. As fate would have it, my status as “new girl” worked in my favor; plus, I had breasts by that time and was becoming almost pretty after my awkward, space-between-my-teeth-with-hairy-legs phase. I had my first-ever male teacher, Mr. Waite, who had red hair and a killer smile. I was in love with him, so of course I made an ass of myself all the time, most poignantly when he read the morning prayer over my shoulder one day and I realized after he walked away that on the back of my hand (which was palm down, holding the book open) was a monstrous booger.

  Me, Dad, and Geoff, 1967

  Canada worked out for me. It was very clean and had candy bars far superior to those in the States. One of my favorite memories is of skiing on winter weekends and enjoying the après-ski treat of a Cadbury’s Crunchie bar and a hot chocolate. A boy named Robbie liked me, and my mother actually bought me an outfit from Eaton’s Department Store—a navy blue wool skirt and a green, orange, and navy striped sweater vest. I reveled in my good fortune for a scant year, but Dad burned my little playhouse down when he announced we were moving again, to Carbondale, Illinois, where by the middle of seventh grade, at the age of twelve, I would become a bag lady.

  Carbondale is a funky town in southern Illinois whose claim to fame is its large university, where my father opted to finish his degree. Carbondale held no charm for me; I’ll just come right out and say it. None of us liked it very much. We made fun of it. The way people talked and their accents and even the name were so … unpoetic.

  The town bordered Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee and had the humidity and summer heat to prove it, which I vividly recall because we arrived in July. We took up residence on a cul-de-sac called Norwood Drive, situated on the outskirts of some woods that separated us from the upscale part of town. I’d never been around strip malls, Walmart, or Arby’s before. Vermillion was too small, Canada too smart. And I’d never experienced a southern accent either, which to me just sounded stupid. Now, having lived in Texas awhile, I’ve changed my mind, but Texas and southern Illinois are a bit different culturally, trust me. Of course, I made friendships there that would last a lifetime, a lesson worth noting. During some of the unhappiest times of my life, I’ve made some of my best friends.

  None of this was obvious to me that blazing-hot summer, and I dreaded my first day of school. I had discovered a Top 40 radio station called KXOK out of St. Louis and was deeply immersed in the hits of that summer, such as “Everyday People,” “Gentle on My Mind,” “Get Back,” “Honky Tonk Women,” and “Just Dropped In (to See What Condition My Condition Was In).” But the unlikely song, if you can call it that, that stands out in my memory, the song that brought me to tears every time, was a jingle for Thom McAn shoes:

  Yesterday they took away my window,

  But I can still see things my way.

  Don’t let them tell you what you can do.

  Do your own thing, do your own thing today.

  To this day it’s one of the only jingles I’ve ever heard that was not only plaintive but in a minor key, surely a misguided notion by someone at Thom McAn, but it worked for me, especially the sentiment that “yesterday they took away my window.” Which was Canada.

  I do remember finding something good even in the isolation I felt after we moved to Carbondale that July. I knew absolutely no one, and the prospect of school terrified me, but in those two remaining months of summer, before I was to start school, I discovered how much I loved to be alone in the house. It was the time I could really sing, whether it was along with Lulu on “To Sir with Love,” or the words I made up to the classical pieces I knew on piano. “Minuet in G,” for example, went like this:

  When the Minuet in G is played,

  People dance and parade.

  When the Minuet in G is played,

  Watch the people dance and then parade.


  What I’ve heard of this song

  It is very good,

  Good for listening.

  When the Minuet in G is played,

  People dance and parade.

  So I guess even way back then, at least part of me wanted to write songs, even though I hadn’t yet heard my songwriting heroes, the ones who would define the genre I would come to want to inhabit.

  I could easily entertain myself for hours while alone at home, just singing and playing and blasting the stereo or the radio. It was always terrific news when the rest of the family would head off to Walmart and I was allowed to have my own, private world of music.

  But soon the wretched day came when it was time for me to start school. What had happened to me? I’d managed the transition reasonably well in Canada, but I felt as if only a limited amount of luck had been allotted to me thus far and that with the move to Carbondale it had run out. I had no faith, none, in myself, in my family, in whomever I might meet, in the teachers I would have. The really odd thing is that I was right.

  I was to take a bus, another first, to Lincoln Junior High School, a massive brick structure just east of downtown Carbondale that housed the town’s entire seventh and eighth grades. There I had the misfortune of being assigned to the meanest teacher who ever drew breath. He was given to throwing erasers and chalk, barking lessons to us in his pinched voice like the army sergeant he once was, crew cut and all, and reading his paycheck aloud to us every Friday. Mercenary? Pshaw.

  There was also corporal punishment at Lincoln, and we had one specific hall monitor, a gigantic hulk of a man who would slowly stroll down the halls, chuckling as he whacked a ruler against his palm. I swear the place felt like a lockdown facility. I was twelve years old, a time when bodies and minds and hearts go through so much, and I was simply not equipped for this passage. The passage had to do with the big, bad world, and I wasn’t ready to be in it—the mean teachers; the ominous, punitive hall monitor; the jaded, cruel kids; the sheer size and breadth of the humanity. I’d attended two small schools in my life, and I had thin skin.