This Body I Wore: A Memoir by Diana Goetsch

Author:Diana Goetsch [Goetsch, Diana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Lgbtq, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9780374722326
Google: fKw9EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: FarrarStraus
Published: 2022-05-24T21:29:44+00:00

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DAD LEFT MOM in early June. He’d been having an affair right under her nose, with a woman named Mrs. Blau, his tournament bridge partner. (Mom had been his bridge partner up until some months before, when he told her he wanted to get more serious about bridge.) He left late at night (I was asleep), then returned the next day to retrieve his financial books and other stuff from his study. Each trip into the study took him through their bedroom, where Mom lay with the covers pulled over her head. She said she planned to lie there until she died.

After Dad left, everything seemed to speed up. I had my wisdom teeth out, turned seventeen, and began Drivers Ed that summer. Carl spent most days over his girlfriend’s house in Kings Park. She was a quiet, verging on catatonic, girl named Gwen. They met playing Christian volleyball and would be married in a few years. Mom got out of bed after a week. “Look at all the weight I’ve lost!” she said, lifting her arms and turning before a mirror.

She brought me to her first meeting with a high-powered divorce lawyer in Nassau County named Jack Solerwitz, who promised to take Dad to the cleaners. “Are you sure you want him here for this?” Jack said, when the two of us got up from the waiting room couch to come into his office. “You don’t know my son,” Mom said—which I supposed was her way of indicating I was mature enough to be privy to her divorce planning.

Since Dad left she seemed to have become enamored of me. She praised me constantly, admiring my intelligence and physical gifts. She said I was a better driver than she was, and often had me take the wheel. She began confiding in me, telling me intimate and sexual details about her marriage to my father. She told me he had always been paranoid and jealous, that he’d accused her of having an affair with Uncle Will, another with Mr. Brewer, his best friend in Stony Brook. She told me he’d had an affair with his secretary, early in the marriage, when I was still in diapers. She regaled me with nonstop complaints about him, such as how other couples dreaded eating out with them because “your father is a cheap tipper.” (She referred to him exclusively as “your father”—as though he now belonged to me.) My mother was hardly a reliable narrator, and I regarded all she said as suspect. On top of that, it was awkward, not to mention covertly incestuous, to be used as her confidant. Still, I was fascinated to hear these things; she was breaking the Goetsch code of silence, and how could I not listen with interest?

Inside his office, Jack Solerwitz got around to asking about my parents’ sex life. My mother assured Jack they’d had a good sex life. Jack asked how likely he was to remarry. “To that bitch?!” Mom howled. She then explained that my father only liked women with well-endowed posteriors, and that Mrs.

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