The Babysitter Read online

  2 LIZA

  My mother married my father so they could finally have sex. She got a kick out of saying it. Truth was, she adored Dad when they were both sixteen and she first saw him at a party in Bridgewater at his family’s funeral home, of all places. He was playing a piano which stood in the corner near an empty casket stand, and he was belting out “Pennies from Heaven.” She was hooked, but she was dead serious about only getting married so she could have sex. Good Catholic girls, among which she considered herself, didn’t have sex before marriage. Not in 1958 anyway. Years later, when I asked about their wedding night, she laughed, remembering my father jumping around their hotel room “holding on to his thing, poor bastard,” as they tried to avoid pregnancy with Catholic birth control: withdrawal. It didn’t work. I was born exactly nine months after that night, and my sister, Louisa, twenty-two months after that.

  Their marriage had begun well enough, but by the time I was four, the soft murmurs from behind their closed bedroom door had been replaced by fighting so loud and ferocious it sent me and Louisa to the cubbyhole crawl space in our bedroom to hide, covering our ears and crouching amid the dusty suitcases stored there. But hiding didn’t work. Our house was tiny, and their screaming pounded through the thin walls.

  As best we could make out from all the yelling, she was sick to damn death of our father, and she wished he’d do us all a favor and jump off the damn Sagamore Bridge, and she was just about ready to pack up his bags and throw him out on his damn ass and be done with his damn shit once and for all! He could tell his damn lies to someone else. She was through.

  And then one night, she really was.

  When Dad came home that night, he tried to explain himself but Mom would hear none of it. Their fighting once again sent me and Louisa to the crawl space, where we fell asleep. Mom finally found us, dragged us out, and put us to bed. In the morning, two of the dusty suitcases were packed and sitting in the hall. Before we knew what hit us, Dad was gone.

  He didn’t say goodbye.

  * * *

  After she threw him out, Mom was desperate to finally be free of Dad. But everybody knew Catholics didn’t divorce. Ever. She had tried her whole life to be a front-row kind of Catholic, so she hoped she was in pretty good standing for getting some special favors from Father Francis Shea, the same priest who had married her and Dad four years before. But, turned out she was wrong.

  “You can’t get a divorce. It’s simply not done,” Father Shea said, and sat back in his chair, scowling.

  “What about an annulment?” she asked.

  “It’s too late for that,” Father Shea said. “Listen, if you won’t think about yourself, Betty, think about the girls. If you are determined to get a divorce, they’ll be damned in the eyes of the Holy Father,” he said, and crossed himself. “The only eyes that matter.”

  “I am very determined to get a divorce.” She was surprised that the words came out cold rather than compliant.

  Father Shea rose from his chair and smoothed the front of his cassock. “Then I think it’s time for you to leave my office,” he said, motioning toward the door. “I can’t help you.”

  She left and slammed the door—hard enough, she hoped, to dislodge the crucifix hanging over the threshold. She was glad she made it to the car before her tears started.

  Mom told the story a lot. It was another of her favorites and one of many I heard while eavesdropping on her phone calls to Joan, Mom’s best friend since college. We called her Auntie because she and Mom were as close as sisters. Mom would sit on the floor under the phone that hung on the kitchen wall—her legs outstretched with a tall glass of rum and Coke balanced between her thighs—put her plaid beanbag ashtray next to her, light a little cigar or one of her Virginia Slims cigarettes, and vent her fury. Her mother, my nana Noonan, told me that’s what girlfriends did: they talked to each other until they were all talked out and calm. I wondered why it never worked with Mom.

  “The Catholic Church is a cult, and that Father Shea is a weasel,” Mom told Auntie, blowing a gust of cigarette smoke above her head. “He owed me that annulment. He owed me.”

  I never knew what that meant, but I could see how sad and angry his denunciation made her. For one thing, she started to swear, a lot. She had always said damn and shit and bastard and bitch, but now she was pissed, fucking pissed, at having spent so much of her young life on her knees genuflecting to the fucking cult. While the swearing was real, I also think she loved to shock Auntie, who “wouldn’t have said shit if she had a mouthful of it,” according to Mom. So Mom said it for her, and then some. She told Auntie she was done, fucking done with all the goddamn Catholic bullshit. And she was. While she still forced Louisa and me to go every Sunday until our confirmations, she was through.

  So Mom went to court and got herself a regular fucking divorce.

  After Dad left, I kind of hoped that Mom’s anger would leave too. But instead it only got worse, and with Dad not there to absorb some of her rage, she came after me with both barrels. When they were in high school together, she had played on the basketball team, and because she gritted her teeth when she dribbled the ball from one end of the court to the other, Dad had nicknamed her “the Fang.” Now, she gritted those teeth at me as she backhanded my face, over and over. I learned not to cry, not to protest, not to fight back, because the few times I had, she’d really railed on me. Challenging her only fueled her rage. So I would stand there and stare her down as the welt grew on my cheek.

  “Mummy hates you,” Louisa said once after I had gotten smacked for bumping into the kitchen table and spilling her rum and Coke.

  I slapped Louisa when she’d said it. She was right, but I didn’t want her to know it, never mind speak it out loud.

  So I became very good at finding places to hide from my mother. I spent hours, sometimes entire days alone reading Nancy Drew mysteries or playing house with my dolls; at least in those make-believe houses I could create a normal family in a world of love, comfort, and, most of all, safety.

  Meanwhile, I waited for Dad to come back and save me, to take me with him wherever he had gone.

  3 TONY

  By December 1961, when Tony enrolled in Provincetown High School to finish his senior year, he had grown into a handsome young man. He was tall, slender, and powerfully built, with a cleft chin, strong jawline, smooth olive complexion, and a head of thick dark hair. Upon Tony’s admission to PHS, the principal, presumably unaware that the young man was on probation for assault and battery, breaking and entering, and attempted rape, noted in his file that he “seems to be a gentleman.”1 He was kind and polite, particularly with adults, always using sir and ma’am. He also gave off an air of sensuality like a fragrance and if he flashed his wide grin, he could turn a junkyard dog into a squirming puppy.

  When Tony traveled the halls of PHS, he wouldn’t just walk—he’d strut, thinking himself an utterly “cool cat,” in the parlance of the 1960s. As one witness would later describe him: “He was cool because he had reserve. He was cool because he had poise. He was cool because he had for authority a quiet scorn.… He was cool because he did his thing regardless of what people thought. He was cool because he went after anything he wanted with breathtaking directness.”2

  Even though Tony’s family members were working-class Portuguese immigrants and his mother a chambermaid who survived during the winter months on welfare and Vinnie’s child support, he thought of himself as a city kid, somehow better and smarter than his Provincetown classmates. He complained that the other kids in his class were “boobs” who threw spitballs and snapped paper clips at each other with rubber bands all day. Instead of his classmates, he preferred hanging out with young teenagers who looked up to him like some sort of an older, hip hero, a role Tony was all too happy to cultivate.

  One day in the spring of 1962, just weeks before his graduation, he approached a group of eighth-grade girls gathered on the sidewalk in front of the Lobster Pot on Commercial Street. He wore polis
hed black shoes with pointed toes, black chinos, and a sport jacket, and the girls watched the high school senior approach with something like wonder. He was moving toward them.

  One of the girls, Judy, said, “That’s my cousin,” as Tony approached.

  When she introduced him to the other girls, he held out a pack of Juicy Fruit gum, assuring them there was “plenty more where this came from.” Judy noticed a ring on his pinkie finger and complimented it.

  “I’m hoping to find a chain and just the right neck to adorn. Any ideas?” he said, giving the girls his best smile. “Well, I am off to the library so I shall bid all of you lovely ladies adieu.”3

  And just like that, thirteen-year-old Avis Lou Johnson fell in love; for the first time in her young life, her future looked bright. Her mother had raised her with an iron fist after her father had disappeared from their life when Avis was just four years old. The abandonment broke Avis’s young heart. When she saw Tony stride up to her and her friends, she felt as if a missing piece in her life had miraculously reappeared. She had written long passages in her diary about the day when she would meet a rich man who’d give her the love she craved and buy her everything she wanted. Instead, she met Tony Costa.

  Within days of their meeting on the street, Avis and Tony were “an item,” but when her mother got wind of it, she tried to shut down the young love. Marian Johnson thought—as did many Provincetown mothers and fathers—that there was something terribly wrong with the seventeen-year-old Tony Costa sniffing around Avis and her friends, handing out sticks of gum and flirting with them about who would wear his ring around their neck.

  Avis, however, was undeterred. She had known Tony most of her life as a summer kid, but when she saw him sauntering toward her and her girlfriends that April morning in 1962, she felt as if she were looking at her future, a future she imagined away from her mother’s stifling control and away from having to care for her sister, Carol, who had contracted lupus, a burden that fell heavily on Avis’s shoulders. When she complained about having to do Carol’s chores, like taking out the garbage or walking the dog, her mother would snap, “You should be grateful you can walk.” As Carol’s condition worsened, chronic pain caused the young girl to become something of a recluse, and Avis would regale her with stories of school, biking all over Provincetown, digging for clams in the bay, and, most of all, boys. After Avis and Tony began dating, Carol lived vicariously through Avis’s hushed confessions of heavy petting and, eventually, of their sex.

  In her older, wiser boyfriend, Avis saw someone who would give her the grown-up life she wanted, and she dreamed of marrying him, playing the name “Mrs. Avis Costa” through her head over and over like a tape. After her confirmation at St. Peter’s, she walked out of the church and saw Tony waiting at the bottom of the stairs, looking like Elvis Presley in his usual outfit of a blazer, pressed chinos, and black shoes, his hair slicked back with Vaseline and a sly smile on his face. As she walked down the steps toward him, she felt like she had gotten married, instead of confirmed.4

  Marian’s fears about Tony only worsened after she learned that he was on probation for an attempted rape back in Somerville only a year before. But it was too late.

  “He wanted me then; we wanted each other,”5 Avis said.

  Because she was only thirteen, they needed her mother’s approval to get married, but Marian refused to grant it. They decided to force her hand by intentionally getting pregnant. He would pick her up at school and they would drive out to the Provincetown dump or Pilgrim Springs to have sex, both places close enough for her to get back to school before her next class. When time wasn’t an issue, they drove out to Truro’s infamous lovers’ lane—a clearing in the dense woods behind the Pine Grove Cemetery—where they would spot the signs of litter left behind by others who’d been there before them with a similar purpose but decidedly different aim: used condoms. It took them six months, but Avis finally conceived, as well she might since they had sex nearly every day, sometimes both morning and night.6

  With the deed done, Marian Johnson put her signature to the marriage license, but she was far from happy about it.

  “You deliberately seduced her,” she told Tony. “You don’t have a conscience or a decent instinct.… You know it, your relatives know it… you are marrying her just to save yourself from jail.”7

  On April 20, 1963, one day shy of the eighteenth anniversary of his father’s death, Tony and Avis married at St. Peter’s with Father Duarte presiding. Already four months pregnant, Avis fainted at the altar, and Tony had to hold her up through the long mass. Later, at the reception in her grandmother’s living room, she vomited up her breakfast. Avis was fourteen years old.

  * * *

  Kids grew up fast in Provincetown. Between the free-wheeling artists, the freedom-seeking homosexuals, the free-love hippies, and the unending supply of drugs and alcohol that flowed through the town like hot lava, young children turned into savvy and often troubled teenagers overnight. It didn’t help that the locals who stayed on past Labor Day and lived in the shuttered, desolate town fought poverty, depression, addiction, and domestic violence through a long, gray winter that stank of rotting fish.

  Avis Johnson Costa was no exception. By the fall of 1963, she had met the man of her dreams, gotten pregnant, then married, and had her first child, Peter—all before she turned fifteen. But, while the lovestruck teenage girl envisioned a life of security, romance, and, best of all, freedom with her charming older husband, Tony quickly crumbled under the weight and responsibility of being a husband and father. He’d often leave their cramped apartment after an argument and walk the beaches and dunes, sometimes all night. A few months into their marriage, Tony got drunk and sat on the couch crying.

  “My feet are staring at me! Go get me a towel to cover them!”

  Avis did, but it was all she could do not to roll her eyes at his histrionics.

  Another time, Tony collapsed in her arms, sobbing, “I can’t do this. I have to get away from here.”8

  “Fine,” she said, rapidly wearying of her fragile husband. “Go. I have the best part of you—Peter.”

  Tony stayed; even though his life felt suffocating, Avis was his anchor, and without her he feared he’d drift away with the next high tide. And although he belittled her, reminding her of her lack of a high school education and mocking her crooked teeth and plain looks, he needed her and she knew it. For all of his failures as a father and husband, Tony loved Avis and baby Peter, perhaps as much as he was capable, but he was unable to give them what he himself most craved: a solid family life, safety, and an end to the increasingly dark and disturbing thoughts roiling through his head.

  * * *

  The first year of their marriage, they lived in a first-floor apartment on Hughes Road in Truro that Avis felt was haunted. Night after night she’d wake to an ominous visage standing at the end of their bed. She’d rouse Tony, crying, “Do you see it? Right there?” He never did, but her belief that something was there was so strong, he once grabbed a rifle he kept next to the bed, aimed it where she pointed, and shot a hole through the wall right above Peter’s crib, who by this point was wailing. While Tony wondered if the possible ghost was a poltergeist of his dead father, Avis began to believe it was the grim reaper and that his portent of death was always lurking, ready to reach out and take someone she needed, or worse, someone she loved.

  Through it all, they fought. Money was always tight even though Cecelia had given them $2,450 ($20,250 in today’s dollars) for a wedding present—$450 in savings bonds and $2,000 she had saved of his father’s $10,000 naval insurance policy. But, by early 1964, less than a year after their marriage, Tony had burned through all of it (which is perhaps not surprising given that he “thanked” his mother for the gift by telling her, “The money means nothing to me. I’d rather have my father,” as if she had had any control over Antone’s fate).

  Their arguments only got worse when Tony’s inability to secure regular work forced
them to borrow money from people all over town. Feeling indebted particularly rankled Tony.

  “We owe them nothing,” he told Avis.

  Calling those who had loaned them money “ignorant jerks,” he insisted, “They ought to pay me just for speaking to them.”9

  4 LIZA

  Mom loved being behind the wheel; it didn’t seem like she cared where we were going, so long as it was somewhere else. And with Dad out of the picture, Louisa and I spent a lot of time in the back seat of her Chevy Malibu. On the longer drives, Louisa mostly slept, especially at night, propped up against her door behind the passenger seat, but I sat wide awake right behind Mom, counting the oncoming headlights on the other side of the road. As she drove, I asked her questions about where we were going, how long until we’d get there, what we would do when we arrived, until she said, “Do you ever shut up? Go to sleep,” and I went back to counting headlights and twirling my already curly hair around my index fingers—a nervous habit I’d picked up from watching my dad, who also twirled his. But as soon as I started, she’d bark, “Stop that twirling, you look like Denny Dimwit.” I didn’t know who that was, but I didn’t like the sound of it, so I’d tuck my fingers under my thighs to keep them out of my hair.

  Sometimes when we were driving home late from Auntie and Uncle Hank’s house, after a long night of them drinking at the kitchen counter, she’d drive with her head almost all the way out the window to keep herself awake. One of those nights, the blue lights of a police cruiser pulled us over.

  “Shit!” Mom said, pulling to the side of the road, the tires biting through gravel.

  I heard her rummage through her purse and then put two or three pieces of gum into her mouth, muttering “shitshitshit” as she watched the cop in the rearview mirror walk up to our car. The car filled with the smell of cinnamon gum as the flickering beam of the cop’s flashlight approached. Usually she was able to smile and laugh and pat the officer’s arm through the open window and just get a warning to “take it easy, young lady. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to you and those pretty girls of yours.” Pretty girls. I loved that. She would laugh and thank him, and then we’d be back on the road, driving so slow it seemed like we could walk home faster. But after she had finally been stopped by a cop she couldn’t sweet-talk, and she lost her license for ninety days; it didn’t keep her from driving, but it sure slowed her down for a while.