Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss Read Online Free Page A

found it clogged with hair, he slapped me across the face three times, until I admitted I’d done it.
    And yet Whitney had these run-ins with my father more than all the rest of us put together.
    One day my father left a fragile clay pipe on a table—well within reach of a toddler’s wandering hands—and then snapped like a mousetrap when Whitney of course broke it.
    “Why the hell did you break my pipe?” my father angrily demanded, taking Whitney by the shirt collar.
    “Because I did,” said my frightened three-year-old brother.
    “Then I’m going to spank you,” said my father.
    “Why?” asked Whitney.
    “Because I am. That’s why.”
    My father and I often went out to a local diner for dinner, just the two of us, while my mother stayed at home to make dinner for the boys. Other times my father and I played a game that I secretly hated, a game ostensibly designed to teach me a valuable skill: how not to get kidnapped.
    I still remember the first time he made me play. “ Frances! ” He shouted from the bottom of the stairs. “Time to practice. Step outside, please.”
    My whole body tensed at the sound of his voice. I could tell from the sour smell of the air around him that he’d been drinking.
    Because we were a known family, because we had a name that made us stand out, it was very important, my father had told me, that I play this game with him. Nothing mattered more than this—not even learning how to swim, or how to read, or how to hit a tennis ball.
    “They’ll take you away and we’ll never see you again,” myfather said. “Or they’ll ask for a ransom that we can’t possibly afford to pay.”
    “What’s a ransom?” I asked.
    “A lot of money—you know, millions of dollars.”
    It seemed a terrible curse to have a recognizable name. But to have a recognizable name and not enough money to pay the ransom?—nothing less than a cruel joke.
    We walked outside.
    “Stand right here,” said my father, his brow unaccountably heavy with anger, pointing to a spot on the sidewalk in front of our house, a six-bedroom Spanish Mediterranean with a sprawling green lawn.
    This was a serious game, a game that made my father stern, impatient.
    I assumed my position on the pavement, a surge of dread twisting my insides. The facades of neighbors’ houses suddenly became menacing faces; the sound of their gardeners mowing, a barrage of violent sound in my head. No one, it seemed, would be able to save me.
    “I’ll go get the car,” said my father, walking across the lawn to the driveway to start the car. Then he drove around the block. Sometime during those two minutes, while I waited alone for the car to reappear from the opposite end of our street, something magical and mortifying happened: my father’s silver Chrysler became someone else’s car, the car of a complete stranger.
    My heart jumped at the sight of the approaching sedan, my abductor’s car, as it slowed down upon spotting me, a small blond girl, seven years old, with straight-cut bangs.
    “Come here, little girl,” a frightening man with my father’s face called tauntingly from the car. He held a Hershey’s chocolate bar out the window.
    I burst into tears and ran away, just as I had been instructed. Kidnappers, I knew, baited young children with candy. But even as I raced up to the front steps of our house, I found no comfort in the familiar. It was the creepy, almost psychotic look on my father’s face as he called out to me, pretending to be someone else, that terrified me.
    C harlie sometimes hid me in his room when my father arrived home from work. We’d sit on his bed and look at books about World War II that he’d borrowed from Bobby, books with pictures of Germans in belted overcoats saluting a man with an Oliver Hardy mustache.
    “That’s Hitler,” Charlie would tell me. “The one who killed all the Jews.”
    I had seen a picture of the Jews once, naked together in a room with no windows. Their hollowed-out eyes